Wade Malone has returned to the harsh poverty of his Indiana home of Taylorville to hide out from his recent past deeds, and within one day he places his daughter, Mattie, on display in a most humiliating, public way. This is not the first abuse seventeen-year-old Emma Conner has witnessed, and this violence triggers her and her best friend Jolene to seek revenge on Wade.
Fortunately for Emma, she lives under the care of her Grandma Rose, who teaches her the ways of being a healer, things that Grandma learned from a Mayan shaman years ago. Grandma recognizes Emma is to come into her own understanding and greater wisdom with their town's dark forces of violence and power.
Along their way to retribution, Emma and Jolene suffer the difficult and deadly consequences of karmic law, where fighting violence with violence only produces more violence. It is only when Emma engages in her extraordinary healing practices is she able to discover the unexpected depths in herself, what it means to have compassion for another, and what it takes to break the cycle of violence. The question is, at what cost does Emma pay before understanding her role in the struggle?

M.C. Lowe has studied the philosophy and psychology around violence and offers her insight through her characters of how to engage challenges from an enlightened perspective. In her debut novel, she explores the darker nature of class divides and the men raised in these worlds placed in contrast to the resourceful women the men harm or condescend.

This is M.C. Lowe's debut fictional book and the first of the By Proxy series.