Under Tower Peak

February 4, 2013
In Paul’s entertaining first novel, a western-flavored thriller, two wilderness guides, Lester Wendover and Tom Smith, discover the wreck of a small plane high up a mountain pass near the California-Nevada border. Sitting against a rock is the blackened corpse of a man who could be the “eccentric billionaire adventurer,” never named, who disappeared months earlier. Lester and his girlfriend see dollar signs, and decide to play the missing man’s warring wife and son against each another, which brings a ton of trouble. On returning to the crash site, Lester and Tom find the body gone. When people start dying in “accidents” after some Cuban thugs show up in nearby Piute Meadows, Calif., Tom is forced to dust off the sniper skills honed during two tours in Iraq. Paul (Double-Edged Sword) vividly captures Tom’s high-country survival skills, as the guide devises clever countermeasures to thwart the increasingly desperate attempts to eliminate him. Agent: Jessica Kaye, Kaye & Mills.

February 15, 2013
Paul (Double Edge Sword, 2009) makes his fiction debut with a tale of greed and violence set in California's Sierra Nevada. It's spring. Tom Smith and Lester Wendover, saddle buddies and guides for high-country horseback expeditions, are up along a mountain trail clearing avalanche debris. In the morning light, Tom spies aircraft wreckage above the timberline. The two climb to investigate, discovering the pilot's body, "more like a mummy than a corpse...like something out of an old National Geographic, a photograph of...that Bronze Age guy who took an arrow up in the Alps." It's the body of a monthslong-missing billionaire adventurer, with a trophy wife wanting him declared dead and a wastrel son preferring the billionaire's new will not be filed. Tom served two tours in Iraq as a sniper. Lester is the proverbial good ol' boy. Without Tom noticing, Lester impulsively strips a Rolex and cash from the wreckage. Later, when Tom learns what Lester has done, he realizes they can't report finding the wreck without being crucified by the law and the media as "body robbers," even though Deputy Sarah Cathcart might have the hots for him. He demands they trek back up to the crash site and replace the purloined items. They do, only to find the corpse missing, replaced by a forged note indicating the pilot survived. In the meantime, Lester and Callie, his good-time girlfriend, have contacted both the trophy wife and the son, Gerald Q, who's immersed in the Miami gangster lifestyle. That brings lawyers from Los Angeles and drug-smuggling Cubanos to the high Sierras. Tom's trusty .270 Remington deer rifle and Leupold scope solve problems for several Miami gunmen before Gerald Q's fake suicide becomes the drug lord's alibi. Paul writes with spare, clean, hard-driving prose that skates along morality's knife-edge--writing reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and James Lee Burke--all the while layered with lush, keenly observed descriptions of the natural world and man's place in it. Wild-country noir with gripping, compelling action.

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Starred review from March 15, 2013
Paul's story bounces off the Steve Fossett mystery of 2008, when the businessman and aviator disappeared with his plane over the Sierra Nevadas. High in the mountains, Paul's narrator, Iraq War vet Tommy Smith, and his partner, Lester Wendover, stumble upon a plane wreck that has eluded myriad searchers. That's how the Fossett case developed, but then Paul spins his story in new directions. Unknown to Tommy, none-too-bright Lester steals a fancy watch from the pilot's body, as well as several thousand dollars from a suspicious sack of cash. Before Tommy can put a lid on things, return the loot, and report the accident, Lester and his girlfriend have contacted lawyers and (unknown to them) criminals across the U.S., seeking a reward and their 15 minutes of fame. Lawyers from L.A. and thugs from Miami are soon crawling all over the mountains, and bodies start piling upuntil Tommy and Lester, ignoring legal counsel, decide to dismantle the plane and hide components all down the mountain. This almost solves the problem of their involvement, but the thugs keep coming even as former-sniper Tommy cuts them down. He'll have to find out what they're after before his mountains become peaceful again. A superior blend of thriller and contemporary western, full of gun lore and with a fine appreciation of the Sierra Nevada wilderness. And Paul's spare, reflective style recalls Hemingway.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)