Detective Andrea Nox is investigating a bizarre and violent murder-suicide with far-reaching consequences, both for Beacon City and the people who run it. But all she has to show for her efforts so far are nonsensical clues and dead ends. Then, there's another murder. Journalist Robert Duncan is visiting home after a personal crisis when the unthinkable happens and he unearths long-kept secrets about his family and his place within it. Before long, he is going back over an old story that implicates powerful people in horrible crimes, drawing him deeper into a dangerous and widespread conspiracy. Frank Mortimer, disturbed son of a wealthy and influential family, has no interest in conspiracies. He only wants to take part in an experimental program that promises to make him 'better.' However, with the shadowy and powerful group known only as The Project pulling the strings, what he is getting better at could prove disastrous for everyone else, as a dangerous power is being unlocked inside him...

The Blue Ridge Parkway began as a dream in the late 1800s and became reality in 1983 when the 469-mile scenic highway was completed. Heavy construction was done by contractors who won bids for the different projects along various sections of the parkway. Construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway began in September 1935 at Cumberland Knob. Civilian Conservation Corps troops took care of the roadsides, landscaping, and structure building. As part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this project was intended to provide jobs throughout the region. Images of America: Building the Blue Ridge Parkway contains approximately 200 construction photographs of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The most visited site in the National Park system, the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway winds along the ridges of the Appalachian mountains in Virginia and North Carolina. According to most accounts, the Parkway was a New Deal "Godsend for the needy," built without conflict or opposition by landscape architects and planners who traced their vision along a scenic, isolated southern landscape. The historical archives relating to this massive public project, however, tell a different and much more complicated story, which Anne Mitchell Whisnant relates in this revealing history of the beloved roadway.