In a Temple of Trees

Cecil Durgin, a twelve-year-old African-American orphan, mutely witnesses the perverse buildup to a brutal murder at an exclusive hunting camp in 1958. Decades later, the shame and guilt still haunt him when fissures begin forming in the lives of several characters unwittingly connected by a young woman's body buried deep in the West Alabama woods. Thirty years of pressure and bitterness ignite an unstoppable chain reaction leading back to the night of the murder--and the truth.

In a Temple of Trees is the story of painful secrets and their inevitable repercussions, for the powerful and the meek, husbands and wives, the living and the dead.