David joined the rock-art pilgrimage to get some space from Claudine. He didn’t know that a small environmental disaster would send her to search for him. Or that they would help two Mormon kids in their escape from home. Misfit Lenctum is a braided ensemble novel of literary or upmarket fiction, complete at 87,000 words. It’s a story of three road trips across the Great Basin of Nevada that converge during one week in April. The protagonist couple, David and Claudine, are pulled apart by the need to discover themselves before their relationship can go any further. David doesn’t know most of the people he’s traveling with: a reformed adult-film actress, a man on unauthorized leave from the Navy, a bored mortgage banker and a former roommate who’s given up his interest in philosophy to go to law school. But David’s transcendentalism and compassion for American Indians brings a spiritual dimension to their journey to rock-art sights in the desert. Claudine moved to the family hotel David and his brother run at Lake Tahoe in part to get away from a stalker. She’s fallen in love with the place, but doesn’t know what to make of David’s sudden departure. She’s fired from her cocktail-waitress job because of David’s annoying brother. When the hotel furnace turns toxic, Claudine takes off to find David with the other full-time residents of the hotel: a 50-something cook still grieving the loss of his young son, two young Hispanic women wrestling with different goals for their relationship and a high-school teacher who’s lost his job because of an affair with a parent. The journey of Jenna and Jesse, both 16, is a quest for freedom from a fundamentalist LSD community and the futures it offered them. They face the most external danger: they have no money, no plan and no understanding of how the “outside world” works. Things get really bad when they are separated and Jenna is abducted.