​The New Hamburg water wheel was built to encourage tourists to hang out at the riverside park, but when a body is found hanging on the wheel, the bucolic life of the town is threatened. In an unlikely turn of events, the town’s mayor becomes a murder suspect,  something made even more threatening by the fact that it is an election year.
Angus MacGregor, the mayor’s former classmate and newly retired and relocated ex-Toronto police detective is called upon to try to save the mayor’s reputation as well as his job as he tries to unmask the real killer. As he travels around the region and to such far off places as Toronto and Vancouver, Angus meets up with an array of characters both good and bad and learns a lot about how small-town folk work together to save their way of life in a world seemingly controlled by big cities and big businesses.
Philip Allen Campbell is a pen name I created to honour three important men in my life: Philip Phee Clark, my great grandfather, the man for whom the word “codger” was coined; Allen Charles Clark, my paternal grandfather who always listened to me; and Charlie Campbell, my first mentor in an educational setting. I grew up on a dairy farm in Essex County, Ontario. I have worked as a teacher in Canada and Northern China and as a cab driver in Waterloo, Ontario. I am now retired and live in Mississauga, Ontario with my wife Song Anny Wang and our cats Joey and Cynthia.  
I wrote Big Wheel in the spring of 1993 shortly after defending my doctorate at UBC. Suddenly, I had nothing to do with my spare time – something I had not experienced for nearly a decade. The Big Wheel story had been tucked away in my mind for a few years, but it took shape quickly that spring.