From the emotional jungle of a dysfunctional family unit, Adam Cain rises through determined self-survival to discover that lovein his caseis a form of delayed gratification. Through harsh twists on his stormy path, his life is formed by what appears to him a hostile environment where he has to fight for his very breath and where a kind word is as rare as an elephants teeth. He lives much of the time in an atmosphere of thwarted love, where it is more of a pale fire than the wondrous heat he sought. At the end of his tunnel, there is no light but murder. Yet he is hell-bent on finding his place in the sunand he does. Briefly.

J. S. Peters was born in Lincoln Park, Michigan in 1930. In the mid-1940s his family moved to California where at sixteen he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served three years as a medic. He later spent ten years in the Navy as a photographer. In 1964 he alighted in Taos, New Mexico as a bartender, where he developed an interest in Southwestern history. In Santa Fe and Alburquerque, then Denver, he pursued his interest in writing and painting.