Renee Harvell is bewildered by the South. People are named Peck Titsworth, for Christ's sake, and every curve in the road hides a dead dog or a "Prepare to meet God" or a "Trust The One Who Bled For You" sign. Emergency Instructions opens with the young Harvell family's arrival in Arkansas during the "summer of death," and follows their struggle to survive in a place where "practitioners of backwoods witchcraft are as common as Methodists and sometimes one in the same."

Joey's been hired as Assistant Professor of History with a specialty in southern conflicts involving Mormons, and Renee teaches special ed at R'Ville Middle. When her life intertwines with Rhonda Love, whose daughter was savagely murdered the summer before, a moment of reckoning flies toward them and their men. Like the far off thrum that ever thumps from the backside of their property, the Harvell's year in the Natural State takes on a heartbeat all its own. What happens is as unpredictable as the mystery lights that hover above the Ozarks that winter, when country women hang snakes from tree limbs to tease out rain that finally comes gushing. Book one of the Go Love Quartet, Emergency Instructions, plumbs blood ties and roots, our inescapable connectedness to place and kin.