East meets West in acclaimed author Gina B. Nahai's mesmerizing story of a journalist on a search for the truth about his father's death -- and his own past -- among the mystical, snake-handling Holy Rollers of Appalachia. When Adam Watkins, illegitimate son of ninety-year-old preacher Little Sam Jenkins, learns that his father has died from a snakebite and that a woman named Blue, a fellow handler, is being charged with murder, Adam abandons his assignment in Lebanon and goes home for the first time in twenty years. Almost immediately, he is drawn into a dark and exhilarating relationship with the purple-eyed beauty Blue. Carried to Appalachia from the mountains of Asia as the child bride of a languages professor, she is both outsider and enigma. Through Blue's and Adam's interwoven stories, Nahai brings to life a land of stunning beauty and heartrending poverty and explores both the triumph of passion over reason and the cross-cultural mysteries of faith.