Lee Dillon Ford is a 32 year-old, barely-functional alcoholic day laborer in Portland, Oregon, whose debaucherous lifestyle of cheap liquor, cheaper women, and little responsibility is abruptly interrupted when his estranged half-brother Barrett is pulled dead from the gray-brown waters of the Willamette River. The police call it suicide. But a voice mail left for Lee by the boy only minutes before his death would seem to suggest otherwise. Driven by a need to determine the truth about Barrett's death when everyone else is content to ignore it, Lee embarks on a hunt to discover the person his brother was, tracing his movements to a farming collective outside the city made up of hippies, activists, slackers, runaways, addicts, and criminals, all led by the enigmatic Edlund Boggs, and ex-soldier now calling himself a Prophet of Mother, the spirit of the Earth. Mother has shown Edlund an impending apocalypse called Renewal, a global event that will decimate civilization and all its advances, resulting in a more primitive world to which most people - products of a modern, dependent society - will be unable to adapt. But not Edlund and Mother's chosen people, The Select. They eschew all modern conveniences, grow their own food, generate their own power, and otherwise live entirely off the grid behind the fortified walls of their multi-acre compound, where they learn and hone the skills necessary not only to survive Renewal, but to thrive in its aftermath. Lee infiltrates this group with the intention of learning more about Barrett's death, but as he spends time with the people and comes to appreciate their philosophy, he discovers inside himself a person he never knew was there. A better person. Aiding this discovery is Clair, the girl who brought Barrett to this place, who began as Lee's prime suspect, but quickly evolved into something more meaningful, further blurring the line between Lee's responsibility to his dead brother, and his responsibility to himself. The deeper he gets, the greater he becomes inextricably committed to Edlund and The Select, becoming one of them in body and spirit. But as preparations fro Renewal grow more extreme, and evidence is revealed that shines a light on Barrett's final days at the farm, Lee must decide which family he belongs to, which version of himself is true, and what to do about the increasingly-unstable community to which he has bound himself. An unflinching thriller, RENEWAL is a cautionary tale from all angles, subversive and raw, and will have readers thinking long after the last page is turned.