The Way

A Social Literary Fiction, Completed at 94k Words, Querying

When Shawn Miller loses his family in a mass church shooting, he must find the strength to keep his last promise to his father: forgive the killer.

Shawn, a broke Missouri college student, has spent years resenting his pastor father for pouring the family's money into a mission in Papua New Guinea. Then, one Sunday morning, a gunman kicks open the church doors. Shawn's father, trying to disarm him, is shot along with the rest of the family. In their final conversation, Shawn gives his word to forgive the shooter.

Years later, Anthony, the man who pulled the trigger, sits on death row. A sharp-tongued intellectual hailing from the Twin Cities, he is being remade by a notorious St. Louis gang leader while haunted in lucid dreams by the girlfriend he murdered in a fit of rage.

Meanwhile, Shawn takes up the mission he once resented, carrying his father's work on in Papua New Guinea. As his dreams drive Anthony toward repentance, the two men's lives collide, and Shawn must decide whether he can keep a promise the world is demanding he break