Until 1993 Peter Cunningham was best known as a writer of popular international thrillers. In September of 1990, however, his eldest son was killed in an automobile accident. The loss of a child at the threshold of adulthood became the subject of Cunningham's next novel, Who Trespass Against Us (1993), which Cunningham describes as a generic transition between the earlier thrillers and the literary fiction of his acclaimed Monument saga that followed. Although the loss of his son compelled him to write Who Trespass Against Us, Cunningham reported, in an unpublished August 2001 e-mail interview with Annette Gilson, that he had also "grown impatient" with the thriller genre (which he termed "entertainment," as distinct from his later literary novels). Who Trespass Against Us draws on the knowledge base Cunningham accumulated while researching political thrillers; in the Monument novels Cunningham fuses the political material with psychological realism and a nascent, lyrical sensitivity to...