Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction

UNDER TOWER PEAK

Bart Paul

A Western Thriller

A missing aviator’s billion-dollar fortune and a fool’s mistake bring mayhem down on a small town in this unrelenting, tautly written debut thriller.

Bart Paul's superb contemporary western thriller, UNDER TOWER PEAK, features a hero named Tommy Smith who is right up there with James Lee Burke's Dave Robichaux. Tommy Smith is a decent, sympathetic man struggling with inner demons and with a mystery that threatens to destroy him and his community. Bart Paul knows his High Sierra country inside out, the way Burke knows New Orleans. UNDER TOWER PEAK is a gorgeously written, searingly honest literary thriller by a first-rate storyteller and outdoorsman. After two tours as a sniper in Iraq, Tommy Smith has returned to his former life as a cowboy and wilderness guide in California’s Sierra Nevada, hoping to reclaim the simplicity of his youth and heal the wounds the world can’t see. When, high on a mountain pass, he and his partner find the wrecked plane of a billionaire aviator-adventurer who disappeared months earlier, a seemingly innocent act triggers a breathtaking cycle of violence that threatens Tommy’s world and the community of friends around him. Soon he is enmeshed in the struggle between the billionaire’s trophy wife and wannabe drug lord son and their allies. Every effort to set things right draws him deeper into a bad situation and closer to needing those deadly skills that he had hoped to leave behind forever. With lean, efficient prose and dialogue that crackles, Bart Paul has written a contemporary thriller of steadily mounting suspense and ruthless action. He captures both the beauty of the high mountain wilderness and the laconic rhythms of the outfitters’ lives, and in Tommy Smith he offers a protagonist whose cool competence, home-grown decency, and clarity of purpose in the face of danger suggest a brotherhood with heroes from the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Bart Paul is the author of TV documentaries, short stories, and Double-Edged Sword, a biography of the American matador Sidney Franklin, who was Ernest Hemingway’s friend. Throughout his school years he spent summers working on cattle ranches and pack outfits in California’s Eastern Sierra. He now divides his time between Los Angeles and the ranching country of this novel.

Available products
Book Published 2013-04-01 by Arcade/Skyhorse

Comments

Under Tower Peak has everything I look for in a thriller–big characters, big action, sharp dialogue, and the magic of place. Bart Paul brings the California mountains to life through Iraqi war sniper Tommy Smith, a tough soul who would like to forget that war and get on with his life in the great outdoors. Circumstances conspire against heroes, though, as they often do in thrillers and in life. This book is engaging as a firefight and haunting as a campfire story.

Bart Paul's UNDER TOWER PEAK is a superb contemporary western thriller. Paul's Tommy Smith is right up there with James Lee Burke's Dave Robichaux. He's a decent, sympathetic man struggling with inner demons and with a mystery that threatens to destroy him and his community. Bart Paul knows his High Sierra country inside out. UNDER TOWER PEAK is a beautifully-written, searingly honest literary thriller by a first-rate storyteller and outdoorsman.”

Paul writes with spare, clean, hard-driving prose that skates along morality's knife-edge—writing reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and James Lee Burke—all the while layered with lush, keenly observed descriptions of the natural world and man’s place in it. Wild-country noir with gripping, compelling action.

Under Tower Peak is a great western thriller. Bart Paul knows how to keep things interesting and his attention to detail is pitch perfect--from how to pack a horse to the relationship between two modern-day cowboys. In Tommy Smith, he has created a western hero that is part John Wayne and part James Bond. Under Tower Peak is a hard book to put down.