The U.S. economy is in shambles. The ordinary citizen is slipping in his battle for family survival. The incoming president denounces the financial shenanigans of speculators and vows to regulate the greed of those who have precipitated the disaster. Vast acres of national forest and a plethora of small businesses are in a life and death struggle against corporate powerhouses skilled at making and exploiting the law. In ballot boxes across the country, the progressive vision has been ratified, promising a counter-offensive against decades of corporate control. The year is 1902. Within an historical context eerily reflective of the current day, John Sagacity Adair, Sage to his friends, is determined to expose the chicanery of the financial establishment. He works secretly on behalf of the growing labor movement, pursuing his mission into hobo jungles, lumber camps, seedy saloons and the drawing rooms of the rich. Fighting beside him are a parlor house madam, a leader in the local Chinese tong, an Appalachian coal-miner's daughter and an Afro-American maitre d who shows more class than the people he serves. On the night Sage uncovers a potential timber fraud, he is also faced with a cry for help. A brutal railroad guard has been murdered and his friend's young nephew must be cleared of the crime. Faced with the choice between pursuing the personal or the political, Sage chooses the personal only to find himself led straight back to the political. Events cause Sage to question how he will maintain his humanity and hope over the course of what promises to be a life long struggle. Winner of the 2010 Indie Book Award for Best Mystery
Susan Stoner, writing as S.L. Stoner, is a native Oregonian who works full time as a labor union lawyer. Like that of her series hero, Sage Adair, Stoner’s life has tends toward the adventurous. She’s worked in skid road bars, Las Vegas casinos, free clinics, and as a prisoners’ advocate, psychology center videographer and federal judge’s intern. Besides living in Portland, Oregon, Susan has also lived in a forest lean-to, a Sikh home in Singapore, alongside an alligator-infested Louisiana bayou, inside a sweltering Las Vegas tent, in a camper atop a ’65 international pick-up truck as well as in a variety of more traditional Houston, Texas abodes. She was a participant in Portland’s original neighborhood movement and has since been involved in citizen activism, like filing and winning a lawsuit to preserve Portland’s soon-to-be-destroyed historical open reservoirs (one of those “win the battle, lose the war” experiences). She lives with her husband and two dogs in Southeast Portland when they are not traveling or hanging out in the great Cascade range forests. One of her passions is historical research, particularly that involving original source material.
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