The Fire Lookout's Lie

About this book:

High on Sentinel Dome, fire lookout Caleb Vance watches the Sierra Nevada turn to tinder. It's July 1864, the Civil War rages three thousand miles east, and the newly granted Yosemite Valley is supposed to be a sanctuary—until Caleb spots a man in the forbidden ravine below Cathedral Rocks, swinging an axe at something hidden in the brush. Hours later, twin plumes of smoke rise on opposite walls of the gorge. One is accident; the other is arson, set precisely where the draft will drive flames toward the Commission's most valuable timber claims.

When a polished surveyor climbs the four-mile trail with maps and threats instead of warnings, Caleb realizes the fire isn't the only thing the state wants controlled. The surveyor's brother—the Commission's own secretary—is already on the high bench with a shotgun, hunting for a boundary marker someone killed to bury. With the valley cutting off behind him and the law hunting the wrong man, Caleb abandons his post and descends into the smoke, carrying a revolver, a dead man's notebook, and a brass key that fits no lock he knows.

*The Fire Lookout's Lie* burns through the myth of wilderness as empty land, revealing a frontier where deeds are forged in blood, surveys are weapons, and the only witness to a conspiracy that reaches from the Mariposa saloons to the halls of Sacramento is a solitary watchman with twenty dollars a month, no kin, and nothing left to lose but the truth.