Deep Creek: A Novel

Dana Hand

Feb 2010 · Sold by HMH

About this ebook

One of the Washington Post’s Best Novels of the Year: A “fascinating” tale of murder in 1880s Idaho, based on real historical events (The Daily Beast).

Idaho Territory, June 1887. A small-town judge takes his young daughter fishing, and she catches a man. Another body surfaces, then another. The final toll: over thirty Chinese gold miners brutally murdered. Their San Francisco employer hires Idaho lawman Joe Vincent to solve the case.
 
Soon he journeys up the wild Snake River with Lee Loi, an ambitious young company investigator, and Grace Sundown, a métis mountain guide with too many secrets. As they track the killers across the Pacific Northwest, through haunted canyons and city streets, each must put aside lies and old grievances to survive a quest that will change them forever.
 
Deep Creek is a historical thriller inspired by actual events and people: the 1887 massacre of Chinese miners in remote and beautiful Hells Canyon, the brave judge who went after their slayers, and the sham race-murder trial that followed.
 
In this enhanced ebook edition, Deep Creek teams history with invention, setting authentic photographs and maps alongside the authors’ brilliant fiction to illuminate this long-forgotten American tragedy, in a tale of courage and redemption, loss and love.
 
The Washington Post has named Deep Creek a Best Novel of 2010, and The Daily Beast/Newsweek ranked it among the dozen best Western novels since 1960.

Ratings and reviews

"The 1887 massacre of more than 30 Chinese gold miners in a remote area of the Idaho territory provides the real-life foundation for this engrossing look at racial prejudice and the settling of the West. . . .an insightful look at how Chinese immigrants and American Indians became the targets of rage and violence. The subsequent capture and trial of the killers illustrate that how the West was won was neither simple nor fair to minorities." — Publishers Weekly From major newspapers: ""Dramatically, even lyrically...the authors elegantly weave an engaging, thrilling, lively narrative of how and why the gang murdered and mutilated... effortlessly wrapped in a backdrop of the growing Wild West, with self-serving land deals, nefarious connections between powerful men and the rustlers, the precariousness of frontier justice, and pervasive racism against the Chinese. A splendid read." — William Wong, San Francisco Chronicle "A gripping, spooky historical novel...full of the unknown and the unknowable...Joe, Lee Loi and Grace form a de facto family and help some appealing children along the way. They create another, entirely credible world, which is what America used to be all about. Deep Creek is highly ambitious and compelling, much more complex than it might appear from paraphrase. The dual authorship of this novel may have something to do with the fact that it's twice as good as it might have been otherwise." — Carolyn See, Washington Post From other writers: "Deep Creek is a vivid, scary, beautiful exploration of a dark moment in American history, all but forgotten, now brought explosively to life." — Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees. "I read this detailed, sharply etched, and vivid evocation of time and place—a novel that is also an exemplary work of historical geography—with profound admiration and not a little envy." —Yi-Fu Tuan, author of Coming Home to China. "The best piece of Old West historical fiction I've seen since Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. It deftly mixes fact and imagination, richly evoking a real time and place, as it tells a compelling story of people wrestling with the dark and tragic side of the frontier." — Donald Worster, author of Under Western Skies and Dust Bowl. "Dana Hand has created a remarkable book—both a high-voltage crime novel and a true account of a violent episode in the history of the American frontier. And it works—vividly, with a fierce narrative power that never slows down." — Samuel Hynes, author of Flights of Passage.

About the author

Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews, who live and work in Princeton, New Jersey. Under their own names, they have published eighteen nonfiction books on American history, literature, and public issues.