Deep Desert Deception: A Smoke Tree Series Novel

by Gary J. George

282 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 2024

About the author

Gary George spent his teenage years in Needles, California, and his Smoke Tree novels are set in the Mojave Desert of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Gary was blessed with a long and happy marriage to his beloved, Ginny Boyd, author of the book "Birdy Bird." When Ginny died in January 2018, Gary could not write for a while. However, during a seventy-mile backpacking trip across the desert from the Colorado River to the middle of the Mojave National Preserve in May of that year, he began to come to terms with her death. When he returned home, he discovered that immersing himself in his writing allowed him a few hours of relief from sadness, and he began work on "The Carnival, The Cross, and the Burning Desert."
In 2024, Gary was diagnosed with four severely blocked arteries in his heart and underwent open-heart surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center. He wrote a book about his experience and recovery, "Out of the Cabbage (CABG) Patch," while concurrently working on the twelfth novel in the Smoke Tree series, "Mojave Desert Jezebeth," which was published in July of 2025. Gary is currently working on the thirteenth book in the series.

Reviews

[Leslie Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This installment of the Smoke Tree Series introduces us for a short time to Burke Henry. A character that you really want to know more about and definitely want to see win in life. We learn his backstory and how his life came to intersect so closely with Horse and Esperanza. The descriptions of the desert, as in all of these novels, is exquisite and the reader is easily transported to this time and place. There are, as in all of these novels, allusions to actual events and historical moments. These are unfettered with the clutter of so many historical novels nowadays as they try to inject the prevailing politics of the author. In this one, we see how things really were for those coming out of WWII and even Korea. The references to the Vietnam War, which in the timeline of this book, the United States was careening towards, are fascinating and provide a context one does not usually get.