In his sleeping bag on the bank of the McKenzie River, aged and homeless Sam Hostick is dying alone when fur trapper Shane Coleman pulls up in his drift boat - just in time for Sam to unload the terrible secret he's carried for fifty years. As Sam begins telling his story, Shane is stunned to learn that Sam knew Shane's now-deceased father, and that the secret concerns the murder of a little girl in 1960. But Sam dies before answering Shane's many questions about his father and the crime. Taking Sam's burden that is now his, Shane hooks up with life-long friend: short-fused, sarcastic, ex-cop, private-investigator Hodge Gilbert to solve the case. What they discover, and who dies along the way, shocks them and others in the peaceful Lost Creek Valley community.
Based on the actual still-unsolved 1960 bean-field murder of little Alice Lee near Pleasant Hill and Dexter, Oregon. Wesley Murphey picked in the very field where Alice was murdered for many summers and, as a teen, worked with Alice’s father. Murphey’s father was Alice’s school bus driver and the mail carrier in the area for 25 years. This somewhat autobiographical thriller will keep you turning pages from start to finish. (304 pages, suspense-thriller) No matter what you may have read in another book or what claims you have heard, the true case is still unsolved in 2022. For a bit more on that see the end of the author interview for this book.
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