Abner DDay

by Jeff Putnam

Once a novelist with high hopes for critical success Byron Oglethorpe is now house-sitting for Russian academics on an island off of Cape Cod, barely subsisting on a daily ration of one layer in a two-layer tin of sardines. Here he is tracked down by Travis Burton, the publisher of one of his two novels and six other books for hire. Despite the death of the subject of his last book for Burton (“the murdered man had been a motivational speaker and an Arab, attributes that could have been fatal for a variety of reasons...”) and disdain for the older man’s dissolute way of life, the cautious Oglethorpe agrees to do another biography for the Burton and Hall imprint—this time of the great monumental minimalist Wally Wilkes, who has not returned for months from a spelunking expedition near his property in France. His widow, his daughter and two of her friends are continuing to manage the Wilkes Inn in his a sprawling resort in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range in California, where they maintain, in addition, a sculpture garden which displays the great man’s major works. The Inn is presently being expanded using hemp-lime building material by a more than six-foot builder by the name of Eleanor Auchincloss, who quickly becomes the reason Oglethorpe is glad to have taken Burton’s assignment. (Oglethorpe is six-foot six , but only 120 lbs., while at six feet Ellie is fifty pounds heavier.) Though the women running the Inn are honest and well-intentioned, behind their backs, while Wilkes was alive, there was a brisk trade in THC-containing cannabis. Brian’s stock with the women goes up when, as the Inn’s new night-man, he helps to avert a murderous attack by one of the cartels. Oglethorpe’s friendship with Burton never wavers though their financial circumstances are now reversed, with Oglethorpe about to become the world’s wealthiest night auditor.

434 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 13, 2020