Burn Coast: A Novel
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Zoë Vanderlip is missing. The Ark is empty. And nobody on McGee Ridge can agree about what exactly happened to her.
McGee Ridge, earthquake-rattled and clinging to the thousand-foot cliffs of the Northern California coast, is nestled in one of a very few truly wild places left in the Lower 48. It is also home to a band of off-grid outlaws who vanished behind the famed Redwood Curtain in the 1960s and whose time there is swiftly coming to an end.
Will Specter, a burned-out journalist for the Los Angeles Times, arrived here to build a wilderness cabin for himself in the ’90s, after spending a decade as a war correspondent. In a community that subsists mainly off illegal cannabis farming, Will is an outlier. So too is Zoë Vanderlip, the revered matriarch of the original 60s settlers, whose adult son Klaus is one of the largest growers in the region. Unlike nearly everyone else, neither Will nor Zoë has ever grown marijuana, but when Zoë suddenly goes missing from her home―a large hand-built structure known as the Ark―the industry’s competing forces can no longer be ignored.
Pairing up with Daniel Likowski, a principled but mysterious grower whose business has been crushed by legalization, Will finds himself swept into a world of lost idealism and desperate loners, mobsters and corporate shell companies, violence and hypocrisy, all operating beneath the canopy of an ancient forest teetering at the very edge of the continent.
Spurned on both by his journalistic zeal and a strange love for the place and its people, Will begins his investigation as a journey to understand not just what happened to Zoë but to all of them.
In this atmospheric rural noir, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge’s debut novel plunges readers into a country that has existed for decades beyond the bounds of America-at-large but nevertheless reflects the essential conflicts of our divided culture.
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Dale Maharidge is the author of thirteen books. His second book, And Their Children After Them, was awarded the 1990 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Times, among others. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University and is currently a tenured professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs. Selected other books include The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism and the Nation’s Future, Someplace Like America, Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War, and most recently, Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s. Maharidge lived in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle for over two decades, in an off-grid homestead that he built himself.
Mark Bramhall has performed off-Broadway, at venues nationwide, and extensively in film and television. He holds numerous honors for his narrations and has repeatedly been featured among AudioFile Magazine’s best readers of the year.
