Here’s one for those who like my crime-writing side, especially those who have enjoyed my semi-autobiographical mystery, Downshift: I’m self-publishing the sequel, Old Growth, in ebook formats and as a POD paperback. You can buy it from my webstore or through Amazon and other online vendors.

If you like brick-and-mortar bookstores (and who here doesn’t?), you can get your friendly neighborhood bookseller to order in a copy for you. There’s even an audio book version, narrated by the excellent Bob Gonzalez, who narrated the audio version of Downshift.

Old Growth is set on Vancouver Island during the mid-1990s, when dope-growing was a burgeoning new industry and environmental activists were swarming in from all over the world to protest logging of old-growth forests in the Carmanah Valley and Clayoquot Sound. It’s a little less autobiographical than Downshift, but it deals with events I was tangentially involved in as a freelance speechwriter working for forest companies and politicians.

Here’s the blurb:

Freelance speechwriter Sid Rafferty signs on to help a neophyte candidate run for election as an alderman in Cumberland, once a booming coal-mining town on Vancouver Island that's now shrunk down to an out-of-the-way little village. But first another writing job makes Sid a witness to a violent death the Mounties are calling murder, then a pair of marijuana-growing brothers want to know what he's doing poking around near their grow-op.

An old colleague from his newspaper offers Sid a job spying on environmental activists, but he finds working undercover is no picnic. And he's about to find out that in Cumby, old currents run as dark and deep as the abandoned mine shafts. Dig down too far and the past can reach up with a deadly grip.

You can read the first chapter here.