MERIDIAN
BOOK THREE OF SEASONS OF WANT AND PLENTY
New ways to make a fortune and settle old scores
A lie will travel around the world before the truth reaches your next-door neighbor. So says Ivan Lukin’s boss at Fort St. Michael on the Bering Sea. But the rumors have proven true; the United States of America has purchased Russian America from the Czar and renamed it Alaska. Now, as the colony erupts in chaos, everyone has a decision to make: Do I stay, or do I go back to Russia?
Lukin, like most colony-born Creoles, has never been to Russia and has no desire to go. So when the young American signalman George Adams comes to him with a business proposition, the way forward is clear.
Amid the mayhem caused by Russia’s withdrawal, Lukin, Adams, and a band of followers make their way up the Yukon River to establish a fur trading station at the mouth of the Tanana River. The Tanana is virgin ground for the fur trade, but they are not alone in the race for its wealth. Other Americans from the Telegraph Expedition have partnered with Lukin’s childhood friend and new adversary Yosif Denisov. Led by the beautiful monster named Zia, they’re coming for money, and for blood.
Based around real events in Alaska’s past, Meridian is Book Three of the series Seasons of Want and Plenty.
Coming in May 2023
SIGNALS
BOOK TWO OF SEASONS OF WANT AND PLENTY
The hard part is forcing himself to give a damn.
It is 1865, and the Russian America Company has kept Ivan Lukin busy working as a boat captain and dog teamster on the treeless Bering Sea coast at Fort
St. Michael. His wife has left him, and with the return of his teenage daughter from boarding school he is thrust into a new life as a single parent. The ocean wind is cold and the monster graven into the face of the moon continues to watch his every move.
Then a ship from the United States pulls into the harbor carrying two dozen Americans in blue uniforms. They’ve been sent to lay a telegraph wire from Siberia, through Russian America, and down to San Francisco. Or so they claim. When Lukin is assigned to serve as their guide, the Company makes one thing clear: He is to watch everything they do and report on their movements, just in case. Because a rumor has been spreading through Russia’s North American colony, something that, if true, will change everyone’s lives forever.
Based around real events in Alaska’s past, Signals is Book Two of the series Seasons of Want and Plenty.
FIREWEED
BOOK ONE OF SEASONS OF WANT AND PLENTY
If he is caught, he will be executed as a spy.
In 1862 Ivan Lukin is the mixed-blood son of the Russian America Company’s most renowned fur trader. He speaks five languages and knows the subarctic forest, its Native inhabitants, and the fur business like no one else. As a young man he was destined for great things, but when famine and mutiny brought his world crashing down he was demoted, reassigned, and made to taste the shame of his own mistakes. Then the Company sends him on a mission as delicate as it is dangerous: Travel alone up the River Kwifpak to spy on the British fur traders who have built an outpost illegally on Russian soil.
Buried in debt, vexed by insomnia, and followed upriver by a monster who devours human souls, he has no choice but to accept. But as he lines his canoe up the broad river into the blank spaces on the map, fate hands him the most unexpected of gifts.
Based around real events in Alaska’s past, Fireweed is Book One of the series Seasons of Want and Plenty.
BLUE TICKET
A naked woman standing in the snow was about the last thing Tyler Wilcox expected to see when he started his dog team down the trail in the spring of 1948.
He was done with Alaska, done with sled dogs and forty below zero and the majesty of the snow-capped mountains. After surviving WWII and saving his pennies for three years, he was finally on his way to art school in Paris, and the so-called Last Frontier where he was born could go to hell for all he cared. But upon seeing her burned-out cabin and desperate circumstances, there was no way to go by without giving her some clothes and a lift to Copper Center. This fateful choice catapults them into an airplane fleeing the U.S. Marshals Service and a family of unhinged gangsters as they try to shepherd a bunch of indigenous mission girls back to their homes in Canada and somehow find a way to make art.
EDGE OF
SOMEWHERE
It was midmorning and already hot when the shark grabbed Charlie Deacon.
Surfing off the coast of Western Australia, Charlie’s life is irrevocably transformed by the trauma of almost being eaten alive. The experience marks him, both across his body with ridges of scar tissue and across his soul with fits of anger and confusion he can’t seem to outrun as he drifts back and forth across Australia on his perpetual hunt for waves. Then a chance encounter at a surf hostel leads him to Amy Glanton, struggling actress and itinerant surfer from his home ground who has been working overtime to stay ahead of her own haunted past. Their love affair sprawls across the southern hemisphere as they lose themselves in the hunt for remote waves that, they hope, can take them back to themselves.
TURN AGAIN
I was told you were a magic man.
In October of 1894, anthropologist Rebecca Ashford arrives in Kodiak, Alaska to interview a Russian prisoner with an American name and an Athabascan Indian past. Aleksandr Campbell has been sentenced to hang for a double murder, killings that took place in his homeland far to the north on the Kenai Peninsula—a little-known part of the territory where Russian is the common language and the handful of resident Americans are foreigners in a strange land. His tale, recorded in her field notes as he waits for the gallows, spans years and miles of wilderness and clashing cultures. It is a story of young love and old magic that is rapidly draining out of the country with the coming of the gold rush—and of a dangerous secret Campbell has carried since childhood.
THE DEVIL’S
SHARE
You better get a good look at him now, Jack, his father said. Cause they aint makin any more like him.
In the spring of his eighteenth year, Jack returns to the Wrangell Mountains to work at a lakeside wilderness lodge near his birthplace—a homestead from which his family was evicted by federal action when he was a toddler. What starts out as a simple summer job helping a family friend with his guiding business quickly becomes a complex struggle for survival among the snares set by bears and glaciers, smugglers and park rangers, bitter weather, and one beautiful, troubled young woman. Jack’s adventure makes for a unique coming of age story; a genuine mountain man cannot fit comfortably in the twenty-first century, and he becomes truly a man out of time.
