The Finding: A Novel

The Finding is a gripping novel about one man’s entanglement with prophecy, fate, and atonement.

It’s the summer of 1987 and Henry Barnes, a veteran Hollywood film producer, director, and movie star, has embarked on a new project: a thriller with mystical overtones about buried treasure.

Barnes is estranged from his beautiful wife Martha, an actress and dancer famous for her fiery personality. Living alone and contemplating his own future and the premise of his film, he’s drawn to prophecy for dramatic purposes but unnerved by it, too. Led by fate to move the setting of his film incrementally closer to home, he becomes enmeshed in the Hopi prediction of a lost treasure’s return and its signal of global calamity.

As his film works its way through preproduction and nears its shooting date, Barnes finds himself increasingly unable to distinguish art from life, creativity from reality, and the world-ending prophecy at the heart of his film from his own headlong destiny.

Dustin Beall Smith is the author of Free Fall (Not-Two Press, 2025), Key Grip (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), and winner of the Bakeless Prize for Non-fiction. His essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and The Gettysburg Review. A creative writing professor at Gettysburg College for eighteen years, Smith worked as a key grip in the film industry for twenty-seven years. In 2000, he completed a four-year prayer cycle with the guidance of a Lakota medicine man. Smith died in March 2026, just as he was finalizing the cover design for this book.