After his wife dies in a plane crash, iconoclastic inventor Al Sharpe moves to Saint Angel Valley in SoCal's high desert to rebuild his life on beloved "Second Chance Acres," building his young daughter a tree house in a giant oak tree and inventing the Sharpe Smoke Scrubber to detoxify wood smoke. Wealthy developer Ches Noonan assails the rural valley with suburban sprawl, building massive housing tracts and plundering its precious water supply to fill swimming pools during California's worst drought. Al and his scrappy friends fight back, halting development with their madcap high jinks and the help of local Indians, ancient demon Tahquitz, and Mother Nature. Welcome to Saint Angel is a dead-serious comedy about development gone mad and townsfolk's--sometimes lethal--battle to protect their precious Arcadia from bulldozers and climate change deniers. Part environmental fiction, part social satire, it speaks to exurban sprawl and the heedless development of fragile natural areas--and to the value of community, another endangered species.