Ranch foreman Clay Hutmacher refuses to say anything about the building’s purpose until he checks with billionaire ranch owner Michael Thompson Gov. While he’s conscientiously photographing the crime scene, somebody starts shooting at him. Seeking a wounded elk and a marauding wolf during a brutal snowstorm, Joe is amazed to discover a human corpse sticking halfway out of a metal outbuilding on the Double Diamond ranch. The Wyoming winter brings maverick game warden Joe Pickett poachers, murderers, spies, and some ferocious bad weather. Overall, the plot is largely believable except for a final twist that many readers may find gratuitous.Ī generally engaging labor of love with details that truly immerse readers in its characters’ work. It’s effectively revealed to be a hard, dangerous, dirty, and ill-paid existence, but it’s also one in which these skilled men take pride, as it’s evident that most guys would not last a day in their shoes. He immerses readers in the logger vocabulary ( tailhold, choker, skyline, crummy, yarder, gut-hammer), and each chapter begins with an uncredited pen-and-ink sketch showing a scene from the logging life. Rowan was himself a logger on the peninsula for almost a decade, so he clearly knows the life in his bones. A dramatic and scary climax leads to a resolution of the mysteries surrounding Ruby as well as Ed’s father. After a Thanksgiving break, the men come back to camp, where Ruby’s found stabbed to death, and Spike’s knife, which he often flaunted, is found beside her body. Then comes new secretary Ruby Faulk she and Ed become friends, and she and Bob become lovers later, she breaks it off with Bob, who’s devastated. Ed and Bob survive their first week, though, and become true loggers and fast friends.
Readers also get a glimpse of a daily grind that would break most men. Readers meet other characters, such as Crank, the boss, and, later, a scary hooktender named Spike Larue. (The book consists of Ed’s recording of these happenings a quarter-century later while on a trip back to the Olympic Peninsula.) His first day on the job, Ed becomes bunkmates with Bob Smith, another newbie, a huge, taciturn Iowan.
In Rowan's short novel, a young logger recalls a past murder and a search for answers.Įd “Knucklehead” Knockle is an angry young man and a fighter who decides, in 1975, to take a job at the logging outfit where his father died in a mysterious accident, before Ed was born.
0 kommentar(er)
