Confluence: Murder in the Mountains

by Jim Oglethorpe, Alice Oglethorpe (Editor)

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1900, but Homer Harkins isn’t celebrating. He’s dead, found hanging by the neck at a mountain lumber mill. To lumberman Henry Brooks, it’s a grim escalation in a series of troubles he’s recently run into. Eager to stop further violence, he asks former cop-turned-saloon-manager Joe Zajac for help. A visit to the scene of the crime turns deadly when Joe and Henry are attacked. Their assailant ends up dead and Joe’s adventure begins.
While Joe works his way through the lumber mill murder mystery, he also agrees to help solve a new problem affecting his former employer, the H.C. Frick Coke Company. A gang is robbing their payrolls and Frick wants Joe to stop them. Joe soon determines that his former nemesis, Kurt Straub, is still alive and behind the crimes — the robberies a prelude to a grand and murderous scheme.
Criminals and anarchists are at work and it’s up to Joe to stop them. But can he figure out their plans in time?

316 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 25, 2016

About the author

I'm 70 years old and a native of Connellsville, Pennsylvania and graduated from Penn State in 1972. After living in Columbia, Maryland for 33 years, My wife Jean and I moved to Fort Myers, Florida in 2007.
In 2009 I was captured by an inspiration to set stories in the little town where I grew up. Not theplace it is now, but the proud town it was in 1900. At that time Connellsville, Pennsylvania was at the heart of America’s industrial revolution. A rich coal seam nearby was being mined, processed and shipped to the steel mills of Pittsburgh. In an era of robber-baron capitalists, few were more successful than local boy H.C. Frick. He became a multi-millionaire off the backs of immigrant laborers.
It’s into this place and time that I drop my protagonist, Joe Zajac. His adventures there are recorded in my two books, "Leisenring No. 1" and "Confluence-Murder in the Mountains".