Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2010
320 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
Idaho Territory, June 1887. A small-town judge takes his young daughter fishing, and she catches a man. Another body surfaces, then another. The final toll: over 30 Chinese gold miners brutally murdered. Their San Francisco employer hires Idaho lawman Joe Vincent to solve the case.
Soon he journeys up the wild Snake River with Lee Loi, an ambitious young company investigator, and Grace Sundown, a métis mountain guide with too many secrets. As they track the killers across the Pacific Northwest, through haunted canyons and city streets, each must put aside lies and old grievances to survive a quest that will change them forever.
Deep Creek is a historical thriller inspired by actual events and people: the 1887 massacre of Chinese miners in remote and beautiful Hells Canyon, the middle-aged judge who went after their slayers, and the sham race-murder trial that followed. This American tragedy was long suppressed and the victims nearly forgotten; Deep Creek teams history and imagination to illuminate how and why, in a seamless, fast-moving tale of courage and redemption, loss and love. A dazzling new novel for fans of Leif Enger, Lisa See, and Ivan Doig.
"Deep Creek is a gripping, spooky historical novel…highly ambitious and compelling, much more complex than it might appear from paraphrase. The dual authorship of this novel [Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews] may have something to do with the fact that it's twice as good as it might have been otherwise." - The Washington Post, Carolyn See
"The plot soon evolves into an insightful look at how Chinese immigrants and American Indians became the targets of rage and violence." - Publishers Weekly
"The makings of a fine novel, obscured by poor pacing and plotting." - Kirkus Reviews
"[T]he authors elegantly weave an engaging, thrilling, lively narrative ... Their prose is spare and vivid.... Their rugged travels make for compelling reading, filled with mystery, tension and dreamy fantasies." - San Francisco Chronicle
This information about Deep Creek was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews, who live and work in Princeton, NJ. Under their own names, they have published eighteen nonfiction books on American history, literature, and public issues. Deep Creek is their first novel.
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