Roseburg 1959
A novel by George Byron Wright
When a town blows up!
On August 7, 1959, at 1:14 a.m., a truckload of explosives blows up, gutting twelve square blocks of downtown Roseburg, Oregon. Ross Bagby stands at the edge the conflagration unaware that his so-called life has also just gone up in the flames. Ross’s often humiliating marriage to the granddaughter of timber baron Jonah Armbruster is already an exercise of placid endurance.
But when war hero Colonel Gordon Butler McKenzie, the figurehead director of the Armbruster charitable foundation, is with the wrong woman when the town explodes, Ross inherits complications he could never have imagined. A piece of shrapnel puts the Colonel in a coma and Ross, as his assistant, is appointed to replace him. Things immediately get messy when a belligerent board member accuses Ross of embezzling foundation funds.
While Ross vents his denial of the theft, the woman the Colonel was with turns up pregnant. Things darken further when Ross receives anonymous letters decrying the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women by men in positions of influence. The desperate letters are pleas for Ross to act on their behalf, to make the abuse go away so the women can have their lives back. Along with his own infatuation with a young waitress, Ross faces layers of adversity such as he has never known. In the days ahead, he will discover what he’s made of.
Tillamook 1952
A novel by George Byron Wright
When the forest explodes . . .
On August 24, 1933, Verlin Victory Lundigun, 32, catches a piece of pitch-fired flaming tree trunk with his face. He is one warrior among thousands fighting the fiercest forest fire in U.S. history—the infamous Tillamook Burn. Verlin lives that day but is horribly scarred. He shields himself from the world with a black mask that cannot hide his rage. Nine months later he is dead from a gunshot.
Verlin’s death is accepted as accidental until his sister Iris dies in 1952. It is then that Iris’ youngest son makes a discovery that compels him to search for how and why his uncle died. Lou Kallander’s quest rekindles old suspicions, guilt and his own long-dormant sense of self.
When Lou confronts the people he thinks have insights into his uncle’s death, they are not willing partners in his quest. His siblings, likewise, are opposed to Lou mucking around in the sour backwaters of the family’s past. He also meets a woman who is housesitting the family home. They become attracted to each other — but not without complications.
TILLAMOOK 1952 is about sibling introspection, the pain of friendship, and a search for absolution.
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Baker City 1948
A novel by George Byron Wright
Available in stores and online now
“Reading about the gruesome death of someone you knew was like accidentally seeing your mother naked; it was too private, but you couldn’t take it back.”
In January 1948, nine-year-old Philip Wade and his little brother David, move to the small Eastern Oregon town of Baker City where their father, Kenneth Wade, is about to begin his career as a mortician. In the spring, Philip’s father hires Jack O’Brien, a local recluse, to help him put on a new roof on their house.
Three weeks later, a local schoolteacher is found beaten to death and Jack O’Brien is accused of her murder. Kenneth Wade is the only person who advocates on O’Brien’s behalf—fully believing the man to be innocent. Philip is a spellbound spectator and narrator of his father’s consuming struggle to save a man he barely knows. Conversely he witnesses his mother, Margaret Wade, demonstrate a quiet determination to keep the specter of violence from distorting the lives of her sons.
Twisted into the father’s fixation to wrest Jack O’Brien from custody, is the relentless memory of a boyhood friend who, when wrongly accused of a killing, hung himself in his jail cell. This long ago horror is key to Kenneth Wade’s motivation—he is caught up in the terrible present because of a past that will not let him go.