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Seneca Wood In Depth
What's the book about?
Woodrow Garrett moved to the Seneca Valley of rural West Virginia to hide from his past. A former reporter for the Baltimore Star, he was working on a story about a mob operated trucking company when his wife and daughter were killed in a freak accident with one of the company’s trucks. Fearing a lawsuit, the newspaper refused to run his articles. In frustration, the reporter drove to the mob front’s offices, slugged a guard and torched the building. Abandoned by his employer, he was found guilty of arson and spent two years in the state penitentiary.
Three years later, he lives deep in the Monongehela National Forest, hiding from the world. His peace is shattered, however, when a real estate developer named Randall Pratt sets his sights on turning the valley into a golf resort called Seneca Wood and developing the river bottom where Wood lives as an industrial park with a poultry plant as its center. Wood refuses to sell, but sees his neighbors who’ve tried to hold out bullied into leaving.
Wayne Zirk, a backward teenager who’s lived on his own since he was 15, finds one of those neighbors, Frank Ashby, murdered in his chicken house. Incorrectly believing he’ll get a reward for finding a body in the river, he drags the dead man to the water and shoves him in. When Ashby turns up murdered at the river’s edge on Wood’s property, two crooked local cops begin working to pin the murder on him. Wood knows that Pratt is behind this and that he will not stop at this one attempt to grab the land.
Mob enforcer Scrag Lynch has his own problems. The mafia has also moved to West Virginia, setting up a poultry company (Happy Cluckers) in Petersburg as a vehicle to launder money from various enterprises up and down the east coast. Driving the body of a troublesome health inspector to the secluded backwater of nearby Cheat Lake, Scrag finds it impossible to unload his cargo since the area, used for years as a mob dump site, is swarming with scuba divers and police of every description. The cops have found their dumping ground.
The discovery of the bodies at the lake and the investigation it sets off means trouble for Victor Bane. The mob accountant in charge of the Happy Cluckers money laundering operation, he has been embezzling from the mafia for years. Now, as the real power behind the new Seneca Wood development, he is about to become his own boss and to walk away from the mob forever. He has been sleeping with Randall Pratt’s wife, Brenda, and plans to grab her, kill him, and start an exciting new life as one of the state’s leading businessmen. That is, if John Clutch, his boss in Baltimore, doesn’t find out about his various illicit activities too soon. The media attention at the lake comes at the worst possible time.
Bane decides to dump the health inspector’s body on Wood Garrett’s property as well. In fact, it occurs to him that if the bodies found at the lake are traced back to the valley, why not pin those on Garrett too? Who wouldn’t believe that another loner with a criminal record hiding out in the middle of a forest had gone nuts and begun murdering government inspectors and other officials? Especially if that nutcase were killed while being apprehended by the local authorities.
Wood decides to fight back, and quickly finds all his closest friends pulled into the battle, including a nudist graduate student named Stephanie; an independent biker named Roarke; Milton Carroll, a sportswriter from Baltimore; and Erin Ashby, the state's attorney to whom he suddenly finds himself more and more attracted. He quickly realizes that the only way he can protect them is to take down Victor Bane and his cronies.
And that's just the first 50 pages.
Seneca Wood is a thriller about a man struggling with his own desire to be left alone, and his obligations to the people who care for him.
The book was recently released by Casperian Books. It isa trade paperback (that's the larger size paperback) and is priced at $15 per copy.
Three years later, he lives deep in the Monongehela National Forest, hiding from the world. His peace is shattered, however, when a real estate developer named Randall Pratt sets his sights on turning the valley into a golf resort called Seneca Wood and developing the river bottom where Wood lives as an industrial park with a poultry plant as its center. Wood refuses to sell, but sees his neighbors who’ve tried to hold out bullied into leaving.
Wayne Zirk, a backward teenager who’s lived on his own since he was 15, finds one of those neighbors, Frank Ashby, murdered in his chicken house. Incorrectly believing he’ll get a reward for finding a body in the river, he drags the dead man to the water and shoves him in. When Ashby turns up murdered at the river’s edge on Wood’s property, two crooked local cops begin working to pin the murder on him. Wood knows that Pratt is behind this and that he will not stop at this one attempt to grab the land.
Mob enforcer Scrag Lynch has his own problems. The mafia has also moved to West Virginia, setting up a poultry company (Happy Cluckers) in Petersburg as a vehicle to launder money from various enterprises up and down the east coast. Driving the body of a troublesome health inspector to the secluded backwater of nearby Cheat Lake, Scrag finds it impossible to unload his cargo since the area, used for years as a mob dump site, is swarming with scuba divers and police of every description. The cops have found their dumping ground.
The discovery of the bodies at the lake and the investigation it sets off means trouble for Victor Bane. The mob accountant in charge of the Happy Cluckers money laundering operation, he has been embezzling from the mafia for years. Now, as the real power behind the new Seneca Wood development, he is about to become his own boss and to walk away from the mob forever. He has been sleeping with Randall Pratt’s wife, Brenda, and plans to grab her, kill him, and start an exciting new life as one of the state’s leading businessmen. That is, if John Clutch, his boss in Baltimore, doesn’t find out about his various illicit activities too soon. The media attention at the lake comes at the worst possible time.
Bane decides to dump the health inspector’s body on Wood Garrett’s property as well. In fact, it occurs to him that if the bodies found at the lake are traced back to the valley, why not pin those on Garrett too? Who wouldn’t believe that another loner with a criminal record hiding out in the middle of a forest had gone nuts and begun murdering government inspectors and other officials? Especially if that nutcase were killed while being apprehended by the local authorities.
Wood decides to fight back, and quickly finds all his closest friends pulled into the battle, including a nudist graduate student named Stephanie; an independent biker named Roarke; Milton Carroll, a sportswriter from Baltimore; and Erin Ashby, the state's attorney to whom he suddenly finds himself more and more attracted. He quickly realizes that the only way he can protect them is to take down Victor Bane and his cronies.
And that's just the first 50 pages.
Seneca Wood is a thriller about a man struggling with his own desire to be left alone, and his obligations to the people who care for him.
The book was recently released by Casperian Books. It isa trade paperback (that's the larger size paperback) and is priced at $15 per copy.
