The Rising

When nine-year old C.J. Walker touches the arm of his mother's dead friend at her wake service and whispers the wish that she wouldn't be dead, he's just trying to do the right thing. But when the undertaker sees the woman's rosary sliding off her outstretched fingers and tumbling lazily down her raised left arm, the firestorm can't be held in check. Desperately frightened people well beyond the funeral home's city boundaries demand to know how many of their own loved ones might have been buried alive by the same criminal undertaker, or by any undertaker. But proof that C.J. Walker can indeed raise the dead is secretly videoed, then publicly aired. In a single morning, with no preparations possible on the part of C.J.'s separated father, Joe, or his mother, Lynn, her home becomes a fortress and her son becomes a target. Grieving individuals desperate to see death let go of their loved ones surround the house to press in both day and night with appeals that soon become demands for C.J.'s attention and response, while squadrons of representatives from news, medical and scientific organizations wrestle to gain whatever footholds can be achieved. But it is zeal-driven religious representatives and powerful government agencies who establish the closest positions and exert the greatest pressures on C.J. and his parents. They do it in pursuit of one overriding goal: to gain maximum control over the only absolute power on earth. Through the ordeal, Lynn and Joe have pulled together with overriding goals to find a way to escape with C.J., to safely keep him hidden from every pursuer, and to make it possible for him to live a normal life again. And to do it all before he's stolen away under whatever government "protective custody" or "national interest" court order might suddenly be used like a hammer to cover his forced removal from his parents with a cloak of legality.

Robert Ovies

Robert Ovies, a former advertising executive, is a Catholic deacon. He has a master's in social work, and with his wife he served as a mission worker on Arizona's Navajo Reservation. For ten years, they were live-in directors of a communal halfway house in the Detroit area. His first novel was The Rising.