The Rockland Chronicles

The Because Fiction Podcast

Taking the pulse of Christian fiction

The last place you want to be when the electricity gives out is the desert–especially in summer. Listen in as I chat with Dante Lupinetti about his book, Desert’s Edge and how it tackles a trek across the desert and up into the mountains… with a couple hundred people in tow!

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Growing up in the area that this book takes place in, I can’t WAIT to read it. EEEP! It’s sitting right there on the shelf, taunting me. Must. Finish. My. Own. Book.

Desert’s Edge by Dante Lupinetti

The grid is down. Phoenix has 72 hours. And the only way out is through 200 miles of desert.

Former Army Ranger Jack Cross hasn’t spoken to his father in three years. Hasn’t been inside a church. Hasn’t let himself believe in much of anything since nineteen firefighters trusted him and didn’t come home.

But his father has been broadcasting on emergency radio every night since the EMP hit.

Come north. There’s room. Come anyway.

Jack has 210 terrified strangers, one missionary doctor running from her own ghosts, and a wooden cross he can’t bring himself to throw away.

The desert doesn’t care about any of that.

Neither does the clock.

When an electromagnetic pulse kills every electronic device in Phoenix during a 118-degree heat wave, Jack faces an impossible choice — stay in a city of 1.7 million people as the infrastructure collapses, or lead more than two hundred terrified strangers two hundred miles north through the Sonoran Desert to Camp Kadesh — his father’s off-grid Christian retreat in the Prescott mountains.

The father he hasn’t spoken to in three years. The refuge the old man spent five years building while everyone called him a fool.

Joining him is Dr. Faith Morrison — missionary physician, Haiti veteran, and a woman whose faith has been ground down by years of watching children die of treatable diseases while her prayers went unanswered. Together they’ll lead a caravan of families, elderly couples, frightened children, and one man hoarding water while others go thirsty — through crashed planes, contaminated water sources, rattlesnake strikes, and triple-digit heat that turns every mile into a question about whether God is still in any of this.

Jack’s father has been broadcasting on emergency radio every night. Come north. There’s room. Come anyway.

The wooden cross is still in Jack’s pocket.

Some things you can’t throw away. Some debts can’t be balanced. And some refuges are built by people who believed — long before anyone else did — that the day would come when you’d need somewhere to run.

Desert’s Edge: A Jack Cross Novel is a post-apocalyptic survival thriller about what it costs to keep walking when everything in you says stop — and what grace looks like when you finally arrive.

Especially for readers of Kyla Stone, Jamie Lee Grey, and William Forstchen.

Series: A Jack Cross Novel, Book 1 Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller / Christian Fiction Content: Clean read. No profanity. No explicit content.

Learn more on WEBSITE and follow on GoodReads and BookBub.

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