Call Down the Hawk
A Latouche County Mystery
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Jane August, an artist who’s “a refugee from a wealthy family,” is visiting her estranged father and his fifth wife on the Columbia River Gorge. Doing a good turn for a wine maker from neighboring Hawk Farm, she is swept into a morass of family secrets and betrayals—in both the cozy farmhouse and the palatial estate. Call Down the Hawk centers on two victims, Frank August and Bill Hough (pronounced Hawk), both of whom enjoy conflict for its own sake. Hawk Farm, in the flood plain of the Columbia, is one focus of trouble, with the recent suicide of Hough and his daughter’s trial by fire as a soldier in Afghanistan. Another is the August mansion on the bluff above, when Jane August’s father vanishes amid charges of his bank’s fiscal malfeasance. Undersheriff Rob Neill is called to the scene when a bulldozer in the orchard uncovers Frank August’s corpse. Until Chief Madeline Thomas of the Klalos clears the murk of violence from the land, Rob won’t be able to uncover the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A lively, diverse cast mainly the members of the Hough and August families makes up only partly for the creaky plot of Simonson's fourth mystery set in Washington's Latouche County (after 2013's Beyond Confusion). Patriarch Bill Hough's recent suicide leaves Alice, a member of the Klalo tribe, unprepared for widowhood. Bill's daughter, Judith, an army vet, suffers from PTSD, and his alienated son, Russell, returns home after Bill's death. When often-married Frank August, a retired banker who owns a vineyard and who, along with his current wife, windsurfer Libby, shares a homestead with Frank's two grown children, banker son Gus and artist daughter Jane disappears and his body later turns up in a cherry orchard at the Hough clan's Hawk Farm, undersheriff Rob Neill investigates. Libby's flirtations and affairs, as well as a romance between Russell and Jane, generate some heat, but the contrived resolution of Frank's murder will leave readers dissatisfied.
