When their family home becomes the target of eminent domain, rage begins to build inside Samuel Faber. Hadn't their family suffered enough? Their father lost his life in the mines. His mother was murdered. His sister Jo was left crippled.

In retaliation, Samuel decides to blow up the courthouse in Elk Fort, Montona. And although he picks a day the courthouse will be empty and the streets clear of passersby, the blast unintentionally injures a dozen people at a church across the street. When his sister, Jo Faber, hears about the bombing, she doesn't immediately tie her brother to the crime. She believes he left to look for work in Wyoming.

Everything she believes changes quickly when a longtime family friend, Sheriff Hawkins, pays her visit. He wants to know where Samuel might have gone. So does the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There is no mistake Samuel was involved. A security camera near the district courthouse recorded everything.

S.M. Hulse's eloquent writing will steal you away from there. The entire story is told through Jo's eyes as she navigates her feelings for her brother, her relationship with the town, and her part-time art. To complicate her emotions, a pastor named Asa Truth, whose daughter was seriously injured in the blast, begins to visit Jo and help her from time to time — hoping to glean some insight into the man who put his daughter in a coma.

Eden Mine is a beautiful novel of the West, testing faith in the face of evil, capturing the deep love people have the land, and how we cope with and attempt to reconcile the aftermath of senseless violence. Hulse addresses some of it directly. But where her work truly shines is the subtlety — with Jo trying to decipher whether the interest in a new painting technique is tied to the innovation or the novelty that her brother is labeled a domestic terrorist.