The Fire Season Payroll

About this book:

1947. The Bitterroot Range is bone-dry, the Forest Service is broke, and a seventy-five-thousand-dollar payroll convoy is rolling into a trap. When a dry-lightning blaze explodes in the West Fork drainage, veteran smokejumper Cole Hicks and his green partner hit the silk above a snag-strewn bench, racing to cut line before the crown fire jumps the creek. Ten miles up on Black Ridge, lookout Nora Kelly—sharp-eyed, solitary, and armed with an Osborne Fire Finder and her father's .30-30—watches the column build its own weather. Then she spots the dust cloud on the abandoned logging spur: two vehicles, wrong road, men with rifles and saws cutting the Deadman's Creek trestle. The radio dies in the fire's static wall. The jumpers are blind in the smoke. The valley crew is mutinying over unpaid wages. And the only bridge out is wired to fail.

From the jump door of a rattling Ford Tri-Motor to the glass-walled cab of a fire tower, *The Fire Season Payroll* braids gritty historical action with a ticking-clock thriller. Cole Hicks carries Bastogne shrapnel in his knee and eighty-two jumps in his bones; Nora Kelly traded a teaching certificate for sixty square feet of solitude and a brass alidade. Together—separated by miles of burning timber—they're the only ones who can stop a heist hidden behind a wildfire, if the fire doesn't kill them first. Pulaskis and Springfields. Crown runs and convoy ambushes. Payroll scrip and blood on the pack trail. This is the summer the mountains collect their debts.