Kari, aged twenty-two, is enrolled at Rayneval University, intending to earn a master's degree. She informs people that she spent many years living on a ranch in Spain owned by her grandfather, and that she was educated there by private tutors. Apart from that, she says little about her past. She has no formal academic credentials whatsoever, and to gain admittance to Rayneval, she is interviewed by professors in the Ancient Studies Department. They are astonished and chagrined to discover that she might be more learned than they are.
Malory is a decade older than Kari, and he arrives in Lucerna equipped with a cover story that explains why he is there. He needs one because the true reason has to do with Kari: he intends to become acquainted with her, win her confidence, and induce her to give him an entrée into the world she has just fled. That world isn't Spain; it's war-torn parts of the Sahara.
Tamara, aged thirty-two, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian of early America, and she is in Lucerna because she was offered a cushy job by the Centre for North American Studies (CNAS), which is associated with Rayneval University. She is working on a book, tentatively entitled Perfidious America, and its argument is the very opposite of the one she developed in her previous book, Middling America. Why the shift? When pressed to answer this question, Tamara either makes an ironic joke or retreats into silence.
Tamara is sharing a condominium apartment with a long-time friend, Wendy. Wendy is bisexual, and one of her former lovers was another historian associated with CNAS, Lorelle Delambre. Lorelle was killed a year before Eternity's Sunrise begins. She and a more recent lover, Alison Mansel, died when they together fell from a cliff on the outskirts of Lucerna. The local coroner was unable to render a verdict on what caused the fall.
Alison was a junior officer in the RCMP, and her death provides Malory with his cover story. The Mounties have engaged the firm that employs him to determine whether there is good reason to believe that Alison and Lorelle were murdered.
Malory finds himself looking into the work Lorelle was engaged in at the time of her death, and in doing so he is introduced to a remarkable cast of historical characters, all of whom shaped the political destiny of North America. It's a cast that includes Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Henry, Peter Pond, Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson, Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, John Jacob Astor, Adrienne de Lafayette and her husband the marquis, Napoleon, and two French diplomats, the comte de Ségur and the comte de Vergennes.
The four novels are entitled Flight of Unknowing, Music of Souls, Winds of Heaven, and Arc of Promise. Readers who discover book one will quickly find themselves on their own flight of unknowing. They will catch glimpses of an apparent destination, but it will be far away, and it will be partially hidden by clouds of mystery. They will nevertheless settle in for the journey ahead, gladdened by the knowledge that it will not end soon. As the quadrilogy unfolds, they will savour the accompanying music, they will be transported by heavenly winds, and they will turn every page pondering the possibilities of promise.
