To Look and Pass

From the bestselling author of Captains and the Kings: The story of a blacksmith’s son, a small town, and a secret dark enough to seal a man’s fate.

Raised in a two-room shack behind his father’s smithy shop, Dan Hendricks was marked as an outcast from earliest childhood. The people of South Kenton assumed the poor, gangly boy would become as shiftless and dissolute as his drunkard father.

Despite the withering judgment and abuse, Dan manages to remain honest and open-hearted into adulthood. He founders in his attempt to find the tenderness and support a man needs. He cannot be with the woman he truly loves, and the one he marries takes a perverse pleasure in seeing him suffer. At the limits of his endurance, when Dan finally breaks we are left to wonder whether this is a destiny foretold or a senseless tragedy.

Full of the force and passion of Taylor Caldwell’s best-known novels, To Look and Pass is a revealing portrait of the dark side of small-town America from an author who “never falters when it comes to storytelling” (Publishers Weekly).