The Last House on the Road: A Novel of Origins, Doubt, and Return

When Adam Carrick buries his brother Daniel — a youth pastor whose worn Bible held one haunting question scrawled on a sticky note — he inherits more than grief. He inherits a crisis of faith that no engineering blueprint can solve. Driven by a single theological thread, Romans 5:12, Adam walks away from his career and embarks on a cross-country journey that takes him from the Hebrew grammar of a retired professor’s study, to the fossil beds of Pittsburgh, to the wind-swept rim of the Grand Canyon, where the rocks themselves seem to tell a different story than the textbooks. Along the way, he encounters genomic scientists, Orthodox priests, geophysicists, and a dying pastor — each one pressing him to decide not just what he believes, but why. Weaving together cryptography, radiometric dati