The Shining Rock Grand

Book excerpt: A lawyer who's losing his job. A keeker who's losing his mind. A courtier who's lost his colony. Kay Pettaway is a troubled psychic entrepreneur who just wants to find a wife and take his remote-view company public before he cycles back into rehab. But his clients have other priorities-the war on drugs, mineral rights on the coastal plain, a 500-year-old conspiracy-and aren't reluctant to subvert Kay's gifts for their own deadly ends. In a story that accelerates from the board rooms of Charlotte, to the mountains of the Blue Ridge, to the wild Outer Banks, we trace his path across North Carolina, a singular corner of the South, where enduring histories, landscapes and languages face down a bewitching aesthetic and technological future.