On a night like any other, Charles Connally quarrels with his wife, leaves their motel room, and walks into a convenience store that turns out to be precisely the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. Violence is the stuff of the nightly news rendered with a realism, horror, and sorrowful compassion that are the strengths of enduring literature. It is also a novel that makes sense out of events that most of us describe as senseless. For as Connally tries to come to terms with his near-death and seemingly arbitrary survival, Richard Bausch traces the invisible threats of brutality that criss-cross his life and his wife's and perhaps the life of an entire country.

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