“Pay attention. Notice what’s right. Notice what’s wrong. Do what needs to be done.”
The Booker siblings grew up hearing this household mantra over and over again.
Now, though, it’s gotten them into trouble.
The Booker Rebellion
by Susan Palmer
Genre: Survival Thriller
A modern wilderness
thriller in the tradition of True Grit
Belinda Booker and her siblings Jack and Emmy know the
forest around their remote Oregon home intimately, so they’re bound to notice
when things change—big trees cut down, motorcycle tracks on trails meant for
people, a stash of cash hidden under a log. Then they stumble on a dead body.
With parents fighting wildfire thousands of miles away and a withered caretaker
aunt at home, they call in a sheriff’s deputy. That’s their first big mistake.
The aunt goes missing, and the Bookers will need all their woodcraft to rescue
her and stop a secret militia training to seize the national forest
headquarters. Home is no harbor. And wildfire is coming.
Praise for The Booker Rebellion
“The Booker Rebellion is a fresh, exciting adventure, a book that moves
as fast and clear as a mountain creek. Susan Palmer knows the landscape of the
Oregon Coast Range intimately, and she brings to the page all the beauty and
danger of that country in rich detail, without slowing the wild ride for a
moment. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Molly Gloss, award-winning author of The Jump-Off Creek and Wild
Life
“Superbly drawn characters, nonstop action. Highly recommended.”
—Elizabeth Engstrom, author of The Itinerant
“A thrill-seeker’s thriller with head-smacking surprises, gritty wisdom,
fierce resilience and fiercer love at every turn.”
—Paul Neville, author of The Garbage Brothers
Amazon * Bookshop.org * Bookbub * Goodreads
Jack and
Emmy ran to the barn, Belinda grabbed their daypacks from the mudroom and
caught up with them at the blackberry bramble, crawling through the low gap.
“Follow
me,” Jack said and started up the path. “There’s something I need to check
out.” When they reached the path fork that led to Fergus Crum’s world, Belinda
stopped, but Jack urged them on. Soon they spotted the ragged blaze on the
tree.
“This is
boring,” Emmy said.
“Take
Magic back to the fork,” Jack said. “See if you can find any huckleberries.”
When Emmy
was gone, he fished in his pocket. “I found this here,” he said and held out
the bullet casing.
Belinda
looked at it and then at the tree. “Here on the ground?” she said.
He scuffed
around with his foot. “About here.”
The dirt
he disturbed revealed a second shiny thing and the two bent down for a closer
look. It was a metal tent peg, hammered almost entirely into the ground with a
small loop showing above. Attached to the peg was a strong thin wire. It was
buried, not deeply, and they easily pulled it up. It went about twelve feet to
a downed log, five or so feet long and draped by big sword ferns. It was
attached to something also buried but they unearthed it easily. It was a black
plastic bag, zippered, the kind of thing someone might use to hold some file
folders. Belinda opened it. It was packed full of money, big and small bills.
She closed it immediately.
“Put it
back,” she said.
“Don’t you
want to know how much?” Jack said and reached for it.
“There’s
thousands in there, Jack. I don’t want to know. That’s money people kill for.
Let’s get out of here.”
“It’s on
Taft land,” he said.
“And it’s
staying on Taft land and we’re forgetting about it.”
“You can
forget about it, but this is a perimeter thing, and I’m not,” he said.
But he
helped her put it back in its shallow grave.
“This has
something to do with those guys from the other night,” she said.
“Is that
you forgetting about it?” Jack said.
“That’s me
filing it as another data point,” she said.
Emmy’s
excited yell brought them down to her. She’d found the huckleberries, was
plucking them one by one and feeding them to Magic.
“Let’s go
visit the owl man,” she said.
“It’s too
far,” Belinda said. “You’d get too tired.”
“I bet I
won’t,” Emmy said.
“I bet you
will,” Belinda said.
“I bet you
can’t beat me,” Jack said and started trotting away from her, heading up toward
Taft Road.
Magic
trotted after him. Emmy yahooed and gave chase. He lagged enough so that she
caught up and then passed him, yelling, “I’m beating you! I’m beating you!”
which provoked Jack enough to pick up his pace, but as he was about to fly by
his little sister, Magic wheeled off the trail. The children stopped and called
the dog, but she wouldn’t come. They followed her off through the ferns, first
Jack, then Emmy and Belinda catching up. She stood in an open space where
something had recently tromped a path that ended in a pile of disturbed dirt
covered with a mound of newly cut fir boughs, still fragrant and green.
Magic, her
nose pushing into the pile, scratched at the ground, then began digging,
whimpering all the while.
“What is
it, girl?” Belinda said. “What is it? A den?”
And then
she felt something twist inside her, a strange mix of fascination and fear. The
dog had scratched away enough of the debris and dirt to reveal a human hand.
And now Magic lay in the dirt beside it gently nudging the stiffened fingers
and whining.
Susan Palmer is a multiple award-winning Oregon journalist
and fiction author whose short stories have appeared in Sunstone magazine and
anthologies including Imagination Fully Dilated. Her first novel, The
Tabernacle Bar, was set in Northern Utah's high country. Her new thriller, The
Booker Rebellion, brings Oregon's Coast Range to vivid life. A hiker, birder,
and embroiderer, she is also a licensed ham radio operator who once bounced her
voice off the moon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband who is far
more competent at ham operations.
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