In , Owen Keane was a young seminarian in rural Indiana whose encounter with murder, and his search for an unknown Keats sonnet, changed the path of his life forever. Now, twenty years later, Owen returns to Indiana for the parole hearing of the man he helped send to prison. Still haunted and restless, still in search of answers to the doubts that ended his dream of the priesthood, Keane is drawn into a mystery with a whimsical religious element. The residents of the isolated town of Rapture, founded by an Adventist sect, the Ordained of God, are disappearing one by one. The Ordained believed that the world would end in 1844 and that they would be taken bodily into heaven. Now, one hundred and fifty years after their rapture failed to occur, something very similar is happening to their descendants. Encouraged by a young doctor who has shut herself away in Rapture, and disarmed by the legend of the Ordained, Keane investigates and steps directly into the grasp of an implacable, murderous evil.