The Novel: In a small community perched on the rugged Pacific coast, a cluster of friends struggle to make a living, only to find their way of life being pushed aside by a large commercial fish farm and processing plant. As the numbers of native salmon upon which they depend shrink, Tom and Clay resist the pressures of change, and labor to keep traditions alive while confronting escalating hostilities. War veterans and life-long friends, they battle social tension, ecological decline, racial prejudice that results in a murder and a complex mystery of political intrigue and organized crime in a hostile takeover of a lifeway, a people. Standing with the two, the indigenous people of the region, for whom current events are yet another episode of an old story. The Author: John L. Purdy grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. A one-time commercial fisherman, university professor, author, and filmmaker, he works to take audiences into rural locales where the modern dramas of change and conflict drive stories at once narrow in scope, yet sweeping in their implications, for us all, globally. His characters reveal the human tensions of an era of massive upheaval, when survival requires communal cohesiveness, and willful acts of compassion, empathy.