The Fire Cache Keeper
A 1920s National Park Thriller

About this book:

In the bone-dry summer of 1922, Glacier National Park is a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Silas Vance runs the park's fire cache system with the precision of a man who knows that a missing axe or a jammed lock means dead rangers. When a routine inventory reveals twelve counterfeit padlocks—solid zinc dummies stamped with government markings—already deployed to remote backcountry caches, Silas realizes this isn't theft. It's murder by bureaucracy. With dry lightning crackling over the Continental Divide and a superintendent more concerned with tourist highways than fire lines, Silas rides alone into the North Fork wilderness to intercept the saboteur before the first crown fire traps crews behind locked doors.

Arthur Gable has packed mules through these mountains for thirty years, but even he's never seen the timber this dry—or the politics this rotten. Someone inside the supply chain is swapping genuine Corbin locks for lead-pot counterfeits, and the trail leads through logging camps, railroad sidings, and ranger stations where every handshake hides a ledger discrepancy. As smoke columns rise from Dutch Creek and a donkey engine with a burned-out spark arrester showers embers onto slash piles, Silas must track a ghost rider on an unshod pony across sixty miles of trail, armed only with cold chisels, genuine padlocks, and the grim arithmetic of survival.

*The Fire Cache Keeper* blends the procedural tension of a classic whodunit with the visceral danger of early wilderness firefighting. Meticulously researched and steeped in the sawdust, linseed oil, and alkali dust of 1920s park service life, this is historical thriller at its most atmospheric—where the next thunderstorm could bring salvation or a firestorm, and the only thing standing between a crew and the flames is a lock that turns.