Rocky Road to Denver by Alan Cook

Roger McAllister has always been a sensible person living a sensible life, but after his globe-trotting wife is killed in a plane crash in 1984, he wants to get away from his job as an accountant for a while, and agrees to participate in a walk from Los Angeles to Denver as a marketing gimmick for Zeus Shoes.

Roger doesn’t realize that the other participants and the walking conditions (from beach to desert to mountains) will take him out of his comfort zone, and that the walk will produce dizzying highs and sub-basement lows in both altitude and his personal feelings.

The other walkers include a struggling female writer, an under-dressed model who corrects people’s grammar, someone from Roger’s distant past, a lady’s man with a part-time English accent, and a triathlete who appears to have lowered himself to come on the walk.

Then there is their support crew: an alcoholic ex-car-racing mechanic who lives by the stopwatch, and his wife, an overweight but good-hearted nurse who can do everything from bus-driving to cooking to medical care.

The Zeus employees who drop in and out of their lives are an Asian-American marketeer with similarities to Roger’s dead wife, and an African-American photographer who is equally comfortable shooting on the beach or while walking backward on a mountain road in the rain.

Roger will face temptation, hardship, and even peril along the way, but he has been comforted and somewhat conflicted by the difficult-to-explain fact that his dead wife seems to be keeping an eye on him.

In any case, win or lose, finish or fail, there’s no doubt that Roger’s life won’t be the same after this adventure.