Back in the Race

He wants to learn why his late father willed the place to the aging caretaker, Cliff, who now lives on there with his assumed daughter, a half-Indian girl named Zabrina

Sensing unanswered questions in the relationship between Cliff, who had served several generations of his family, and his father, Jonathan seeks answers, only to be met with antagonism and the threat of violence

But as he probes deeper he also confronts the disturbing truth of his forebears' often destructive singlemindedness, from those who ravaged souls in order to save them, to those who despoiled the land in search of wealth and power

In the end Jonathan and Zabrina (who may, in truth, be his half-sister) symbolically burn the Edwards family album, thereby exorcising the ghosts of the past and, at last, freeing themselves to deal with the present - and the future - as individuals in control of their own destinies

An engrossing, skillfully drawn re-evaluation of our country's ambiguous Puritan heritage, in which a young man, the seventh-generation descendant of a distinguished American family, returns to his ancestral summer home determined to confront - and fathom - his past and the unsettling legacy of his forefathers