What the River Carries
September, 1889. Reverend Elias Cane rides into a remote Clearwater River logging camp on a routine pastoral call - a young Methodist minister named Eli Cross has gone missing, and the district superintendent wants him found. The camp manager, Thomas Harwood, is helpful, reasonable, and clearly hiding something. The men move through their work in silence. And there is a body in the river that no one wants to identify.
What the river has been carrying is the truth about what the Clearwater Timber Company is doing to the land it sits on - Nez Perce land, documented and claimed by treaty, now being stripped of old-growth pine at a rate that will leave nothing in a decade. Thomas Running Elk knew this. He had the documents to prove it. And now Thomas Running Elk is dead.
His daughter Nara knows where the documents are. Eli Cross knows what happened in the timber. Gideon Marsh, the camp's logging foreman, knows who gave the order. What none of them can do alone is find a way to bring any of it into the light. That is what Cane is for.
Readers who know Thomas Running Elk from The Camas and the Rope - alive and patient and wise at Weippe Prairie just three months earlier - will feel his absence here with particular weight. This is the cost of riding a circuit through a world that doesn't always protect the people worth protecting.
What the River Carries is the sixth book in the Circuit Rider Mysteries - a series of religious historical mysteries set in the 1880s American West. Each book stands alone.
"But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." - Amos 5:24
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