Service Name
New SneakerWave SF and Mysteries
The Town that Died is a murder mystery with an environmental message, a thriller that provides a poignant look at the beauty and heart-breaking problems of rural America.
Shortly before Martin Lindstrom was born, a TV news crew from 60 Minutes came to his hometown, Chinook Oregon to cover the collapse of the timber industry. After a few days of documenting how the shutdown of all the local saw mills pushed unemployment back to levels not seen since the 1930s, they filed a primetime report called “The Town that Died.” Then they went back to New York City, and, like the rest of the world, forgot about this little town on the north coast of Oregon.
Thirty-five years later, Chinook Oregon is as beautiful and depressed as ever. Each year nearly a million tourists continue to visit its beautiful beaches and rain forests without noticing that half of the Main Street shops are boarded up, opiate usage is rampant, and housing foreclosures fill the local paper.
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Nor has much changed for Martin Lindstrom. After managing to escape the small down life he always hated and becoming a successful Wall Street lawyer, a scandal at Martin's New York law firm forced him to return home to takeover his father’s law practice. Now, instead of defending rich bankers, money launderers and white-collar crooks, he’s handling a mind-numbing succession of drunk driving cases, divorces and property foreclosures.
Hope seems as scarce as the dwindling salmon runs until Lindstrom’s former high school classmate and successful venture capitalist Ned Everett returns to town with plans to build a new sawmill and offers Martin a job with his Seattle investment firm. But the town's hope for a revival and Martin's chances of escaping go up in smoke when the investigators claim prominent local logging companies have been setting forest fires to get lucrative salvage logging contracts. But before the case gets very far, a Forest Ranger is brutally murdered and a local logger who is the prime suspect manages to escape. Some locals and a few cable news hosts lionize the escaped killer, saying he is being framed by the Feds for trying to fight excessive environmental regulations. As the town's only lawyer, Martin soon finds himself in the middle of the mess, first defending the accused killer and then trying to fend off Federal investigators who are threatening to arrest Ned Everett and Martin Lindstrom’s father.
To solve this crime, Martin must dive deep into the poverty, environmental problems and anger afflicting many small towns if he hopes to salvage his career and keep his father out of prison.
