For Patrick Nolan, every climb tells a story. And now maybe it’s his own …. He’s right at the rim, staring over the cliff’s knife edge and wondering how things went wrong so quickly.

It all started after arriving home from a weekend climbing trip with his father, Kevin. That’s when word reached them. In a silent moment, they’d lost the person most important to them—her death raising unanswerable questions and dangerous doubts.

Launching a new life in a new town to escape their pain, son and father find themselves in danger of being torn apart forever. As his father seeks a route to solace on the dangerous high face of the rock, Patrick finds a path to hope with the unlikeliest of allies—a pastor’s daughter. Together they must discover the one answer that can bring Patrick and Kevin back from the brink of the precipice

Q: What was your favorite scene?

I won’t describe what it is, because that would be a spoiler for the readers, but my favorite scene in this book was the final one, which I think is the way it should be. After all, the reader has spent 100,000 words getting to that point, so it should be worth the trip. And a bit of trivia about that scene is that, in the weird, rear-view-mirror writing style that I sometimes employ, it was the very first scene I wrote for that book. It got revised, of course – it all gets revised. But that scene was the first words-on-paper work I did for In High Places.

Q: Do you have a testimonial/review you’d like to include?

Some Christians can tell you right to the minute when they invited Christ into their life, and I certainly count myself among their number. But I can also tell you exactly when I realized that I had that Pascalian God-shaped hole within my heart. It was not all that incredibly long ago—it was 1994—and I was on a deep wall dive off the island of Andros, in the Bahamas. We were diving next to The Tongue of the Ocean, a stretch of water so deep that the US Navy regularly uses it for the acoustical testing of submarines. Our agenda was to go to a ledge that was 190 feet deep, and as I was the photographer for the party, I was going to go a little deeper and get a shot looking up at the rest of the divers, with the wall soaring surface-ward above them.

It was a time when the list of things going right in my life was absolutely nonexistent. And when I had finally leveled off at about 205 feet and taken my pictures, the rest of the party became engrossed in the profusion of life that is a healthy coral wall, but I found myself drawn the other direction—to the deep water that lay beneath the wall. It descended in increasingly dark shades of blue: from turquoise, to azure, to cerulean, to purple, to black. There was absolutely nothing moving in it. It fascinated me, because it looked exactly the way I felt. And even though one of my pet peeves about us Christians is the way we’re drawn to exclusive language and code-words, I vividly remember the phrase that washed, over and over, though my mind as I looked at that empty water: “I’m lost … I’m lost … I’m … lost.”

Two self-effacing years later, while having lunch with Dan Woodward (a pastor friend who is so like me that it is scary) I surrendered myself to Christ at a Chinese restaurant in Pontiac, Illinois—just after the entrée and well before the fortune cookie. Within six months I was active in evangelism, and within the year I had become convinced that it would not be enough for me to dabble avocationally in ministry; I was going to have to live it.

When I tell people this story, they often refer to it as my “conversion.” I disagree. I’m convinced that my conversion is an ongoing process. It’s not that I’m not sure of heaven—I am—but like Peter, who decided to follow Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, called him “God” two years later, and did not realize Christianity could be for everybody until after the Resurrection and the Ascension, I am constantly discovering new layers to my relationship with God, new depths to the walk.

Maybe I’m just naturally slow on the uptake. Probably not. I don’t believe Jesus ever wants us to master Christianity. I think it’s a long slow soak in humility and wonder—one that dissolves the part of us that loves the self, and irrigates our concern for those around us.

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Tom Morrisey is a rock climber, a technical scuba diver, a cave diver, a competition pistol shooter, a Harley rider, a writes-every-day author of fiction, and a person who is amazed and humbled by the fact that the author of the universe suffered and died for his sin. He lives with his wife and daughter in Belle Isle, Florida, and is currently working on a how-to, with a working title of Novel: An Insider’s Guide to the Craft.