Jack was beginning to think maybe he didn't want to know what was in the woods on the other side of the ditch, so he decided to see if he could scare it away. At Jack's feet was the egg-shaped, white quartz rock he had placed on the top of his cairn, so he picked it up and threw it high into the trees and listened to it crash through the branches to the ground. Jack didn't hear the sound of an animal trotting through the woods, just more silence. Either the animal had left again without Jack hearing it leave, or the rock was not enough to scare it away. Jack decided the best thing to do was to head back home, and he and Tawny turned to walk away. After only a couple steps, Jack heard something hit the ground behind him with a loud thud. He turned to see what it was, and there, lying on the ground about five feet away, was the quartz rock. After decades of hiking and mapping thousands of miles of trails, Jack had seen and heard many strange things. Most could be explained as Mother Nature just doing her thing; however, a few of them were just strange enough to stay with him forever. The strange, nonhuman howl. The rock returned from the trees by some unknown thing. Keith, the unusual man who kept showing up on the trail. The canyon that man told him about. Jack didn't know it yet, but everything he did and everywhere he went was leading him to that canyon. What will he find there? Why does Keith think it is so important? And maybe most importantly, what does Keith have to do with the mysterious creature Jack's been tracking?

One of the Washington Post’s Best Novels of the Year: A “fascinating” tale of murder in 1880s Idaho, based on real historical events (The Daily Beast). Idaho Territory, June 1887. A small-town judge takes his young daughter fishing, and she catches a man. Another body surfaces, then another. The final toll: over thirty Chinese gold miners brutally murdered. Their San Francisco employer hires Idaho lawman Joe Vincent to solve the case. Soon he journeys up the wild Snake River with Lee Loi, an ambitious young company investigator, and Grace Sundown, a métis mountain guide with too many secrets. As they track the killers across the Pacific Northwest, through haunted canyons and city streets, each must put aside lies and old grievances to survive a quest that will change them forever. Deep Creek is a historical thriller inspired by actual events and people: the 1887 massacre of Chinese miners in remote and beautiful Hells Canyon, the brave judge who went after their slayers, and the sham race-murder trial that followed. In this enhanced ebook edition, Deep Creek teams history with invention, setting authentic photographs and maps alongside the authors’ brilliant fiction to illuminate this long-forgotten American tragedy, in a tale of courage and redemption, loss and love. The Washington Post has named Deep Creek a Best Novel of 2010, and The Daily Beast/Newsweek ranked it among the dozen best Western novels since 1960.