Regional authors stop in for Country Bookshelf visit
Country Bookshelf in Downtown Bozeman — Montana’s largest independent bookstore since 1957 — has an exciting slate of upcoming events for bookworms and literature enthusiasts alike.
On Monday, July 17th, join for “A Cold Hearted Night” with authors Christine Carbo and Keith McCafferty at 7pm.
Bozeman’s McCafferty will read from his book, Cold Hearted River: A Sean Stranahan Mystery. A story of lost treasure, the novel begins with the death of a woman, stranded in a spring snowstorm, who in desperation climbs into a bear’s den. When Sheriff Martha Ettinger, reunited with once-again lover Sean Stranahan, investigates, she finds a fly wallet in a pannier of the dead woman’s horse, the leather engraved with the initials EH. Only a few days before, Patrick Willoughby, the president of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club, had been approached by a man selling fishing gear that he claims once belonged to Ernest Hemingway. A coincidence? Sean doesn’t think so, and he soon finds himself on the trail of a missing steamer trunk rumored to contain not only the famous writer’s valuable fly fishing gear, but priceless samples of his unpublished work.
The investigation will take Sean through extraordinary chapters in Hemingway’s life. Inspired by a true story, Cold Hearted River is a thrilling adventure, moving from Montana to Michigan, where a woman grapples with the secrets in her heart, to a cabin in Wyoming under the Froze To Death Plateau, and finally to the ruins in Havana, where an old man struggles to complete his life’s mission one true sentence at a time.
Visiting from Whitefish, Carbo will discuss her book, The Weight of Night. National park police officer Monty Harris and forensic anthropologist Gretchen Larson take turns narrating Carbo’s engrossing third novel set in Montana’s Glacier National Park (after 2016’s Mortal Fall). When a young man with a crushed skull is found buried in the park, Monty and Gretchen set out to ascertain his identity and catch his killer, amid a raging forest fire. They also have to look for a missing 13-year-old boy, Jeremy Corey. Gretchen and Monty are each plagued by ghosts from their pasts: Gretchen, who was institutionalized as a teen in a Norwegian mental facility, suffers from parasomnia, causing her to act out unconsciously while sleepwalking. Her parasomnia recurs the night before the discovery of the young man’s body. The hunt for Jeremy dredges up painful memories for Monty, who had a boyhood friend who similarly disappeared and was never found. The suspense builds as the pair race to stop a monster who apparently keeps victims alive for days before killing them. An intricate plot complements the compelling characters.
Meet author Brooke Williams when he visits Wednesday, July 19th to read selections from his book, Open Midnight, at 7pm.
Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wilderness — Williams’ year alone with his dog, ground truthing backcountry maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, William Williams, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the ocean and the American wild almost to Utah, dying a week short. The story follows two levels of history — personal, as represented by his forbear, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as William Williams.
As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes he’s armed with few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, “If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, appearing at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course.
The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires Williams to create imagined scenes in which his ancestor meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness. Grounded in the present by his descriptions of the Utah lands he explores, Williams’ vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild.
Open Midnight beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime.
Country Bookshelf is located at 28 W. Main St. Events are free and open to the public. For more information about the store or these events, visit www.countrybookshelf.com or call (406) 587-0166. •
