Agents/Publishers

For prospective agents and publishers:

I am offering for your consideration my recently completed novel, “The Firetower”. Click here for Chapters 1 – 3 and a synopsis (including other pertinent information). The full manuscript is available upon request (total word count: 201,000).

If I had to pick a genre for my novel, it would be “mystery” – though not in a conventional, detective-story sense. The story takes place in a (fictional) Northern Ontario logging town named Magnon. It concerns a series of incidents involving the family that owns the local lumber mill and, effectively, the town. Before the story begins, the patriarch, up one night on the firetower located on a ridge behind the mill, has a heart attack and topples over the edge to his death. The main character (the first-person narrator) is a young man, Josh, distantly related to the family in question. His journalism career and his marriage have both come off the tracks in Toronto and he decides to return to Magnon, ostensibly to help look after his ailing father but more surreptitiously to do research on the town for a magazine article. Though for him it’s therapy, others see it differently. He encounters not just hostility but also some disquieting pieces of information – information that shows certain past events to have been less accidental than originally deemed. The revelations draw closer to Josh himself as they ensnare his friend Sam (son of the deceased patriarch) and then his own mother. He grapples with the dilemma of which secrets to divulge and how, as his article evolves from a story about a small-town microcosm to an account of a town that’s far less anonymous. It’s not until events explode on Josh – so unpredictably, shockingly, and yet so understandably – that he sees what needs to be done.