About this item
Montana, 1968: The small town of Paradise Valley is ripped open when popular rancher and notorious bachelor Tom Butcher is found murdered one morning, beaten to death by a baseball bat. Suspicion among the tight-knit community immediately falls on the outsider, Carl Logan, who recently moved in with his family and his troubled son Roger. What Carl doesn't realize is that there are plenty of people in Paradise Valley who have reason to kill Tom Butcher. Complications arise when the investigating officers discover that Tom Butcher had a secret -- a secret he kept even from Junior Kirby, a lifelong rancher and Butcher's best friend. As accusations fly and secrets are revealed one after another, the people of Paradise Valley learn how deeply Tom Butcher was embedded in their lives, and that they may not have known him at all.With familiar mastery, Russell Rowland, the author of In Open Spaces and Fifty-Six Counties, returns to rural Montana to explore a small town torn apart by secrets and suspicions, and how the tenuous bonds of friendship struggle to hold against the differences that would sever us.
About the Author
Russell Rowland has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He has published three novels. IN OPEN SPACES (Harpercollins 2002), received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly and made the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list. The sequel, THE WATERSHED YEARS, was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award for fiction. His third novel, HIGH AND INSIDE, was released in June 2013 with Bangtail Press. He also co-edited an anthology of essays by writers from the West, WEST OF 98: LIVING AND WRITING THE NEW AMERICAN WEST. He currently lives in Billings, Montana, where he teaches at MSU-B and does private consulting with other writers. You can learn more about Mr. Rowland at www.russellrowland.com, where he also writes a weekly blog.
