A spell-binding novel of a modern-day Saint Francis, who is transformed by the drama, tragedy, and redemptive promise of one of the great migrations of history - along the river called the Rio Grande. Adrian Northwood is a painter and a very rich young man - his family contributes millions to the Vatican - whose wife and son have just died horribly. Suddenly rootless, the dazed and remorseful Northwood drives aimlessly through the United States, stopping finally at the U.S.-Mexican border. There he watches with fascination the endless stream of Mexicans and Central Americans struggling to cross the river - men, women, and glue-sniffing children in search of safety and salvation in a new world. In this squalor and misery of border-town survival, Adrian Northwood sees his future.

Northwood buys abandoned barracks on the border and builds a shelter for the refugees. He brings in food, medicine. He finds a damaged boy. Can this be the son he has lost? He delivers a prostitute's child and takes the baby as his daughter. He becomes the savior of the dispossessed but the scourge of rednecks and rich Americans in the region, and of the Mexican police. One day he is arrested, thrown into a vast Mexican penitentiary, hell itself, and is tortured continuously. He survives only by his own inner strength; in his soul he hears the music of Mozart, the poetry of Goethe, remembers that he is needed. Out of prison his ordeal continues. His precious paintings - one a head of Saint Francis - have been stolen. He knows the thief, the Mexican vagabond and Judas, Lazaro. Adrian pursues Lazaro ever deeper into the interior and jungles of Mexico. But Adrian is also in pursuit of himself.

With a vivid narrative drive and dazzling language, Edward Sheehan spans the vast distance between North and South, the corridors of St. Peter's and the hellhole of a Mexican prison. He reshapes the stuff of headlines into a novel that is timeless, almost mythic, in its resonances - and immensely moving.