John Benumeane, a budding solar engineer who's just moved to Southern California, learns the hard way how cruel and unrelenting Mother Nature can be. It's the winter of 2004; an El Niño is back with a vengeance. A horrific weather-related accident-a car collision with a two-hundred-year-old eucalyptus tree-lands John in the hospital, where he'll spend the next two years in a coma, locked in a struggle between life and death. He awakens in a different world than the one he left. Although he suffers no physical impairment from the terrible accident, he finds he has a supernatural power that slowly takes control of his life. His own impetuous behavior is rivaled only by that of his wife-who in her own bid to survive the lonely years without him, has reinvented herself in ways that defy description. The challenge for the two young lovers is to find common ground that will lead them back to the life they once knew. But that ground is elusive and unstable, prompting John's wife to turn to John's old college friend for help-and when she does, the plot thickens. By then a drought has gripped the Lower Forty-Eight and the real estate market is hyperventilating from reckless malfeasance, with John's wife in the center of it all. The people she works for want to own John and the very special gift he's come to possess, but she has other ideas. Her story-within-a-story has twists and turns that will keep you guessing till the very end.