About the Novel
As country lawyer Jedidiah Hartman walks to the courthouse the morning after Memorial Day, 1994, the scanner in the local café suddenly erupts with police chatter. Sixteen-year-old Dakota Cloud has been found murdered near Stonehenge, the county’s weathered WWI monument on the banks of the Columbia River.
Hartman shows no surprise; he’s been waiting for the news.
The Portland Infidels and the other outlaw motorcycle gangs camped nearby are natural suspects: they inhabit a culture that treats women like chattel. But the bikers didn’t do it.
When the sheriff closes in on the truth, Hartman knows the stakes are too high to allow him to succeed. In a community already strained by ambition, loyalty, and fear, he begins to use the law—and sometimes step outside of it—in pursuit of his own version of justice.
The story begins . . .
“For less than a minute the four of us stood at the four corners of the altar stone like Druid priests under the waning moon and made decisions that, three years later, still seem like the right ones.”