“Pay attention. Notice what’s right. Notice what’s wrong. Do what needs to be done.”
The Booker siblings grew up hearing this household mantra over and over again.
Now, though, it’s gotten them into trouble.
The Booker Rebellion
by Susan Palmer
Genre: Survival Thriller
A modern wilderness
thriller in the tradition of True Grit
Belinda Booker and her siblings Jack and Emmy know the
forest around their remote Oregon home intimately, so they’re bound to notice
when things change—big trees cut down, motorcycle tracks on trails meant for
people, a stash of cash hidden under a log. Then they stumble on a dead body.
With parents fighting wildfire thousands of miles away and a withered caretaker
aunt at home, they call in a sheriff’s deputy. That’s their first big mistake.
The aunt goes missing, and the Bookers will need all their woodcraft to rescue
her and stop a secret militia training to seize the national forest
headquarters. Home is no harbor. And wildfire is coming.
Praise for The Booker Rebellion
“The Booker Rebellion is a fresh, exciting adventure, a book that moves
as fast and clear as a mountain creek. Susan Palmer knows the landscape of the
Oregon Coast Range intimately, and she brings to the page all the beauty and
danger of that country in rich detail, without slowing the wild ride for a
moment. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Molly Gloss, award-winning author of The Jump-Off Creek and Wild
Life
“Superbly drawn characters, nonstop action. Highly recommended.”
—Elizabeth Engstrom, author of The Itinerant
“A thrill-seeker’s thriller with head-smacking surprises, gritty wisdom,
fierce resilience and fiercer love at every turn.”
—Paul Neville, author of The Garbage Brothers
Amazon * Bookshop.org * Bookbub * Goodreads
Belinda
pulled a folding knife from her back pocket and flicked it open. She dared not
use her flashlight. Something brushed against papery ferns. A twig snapped. Her
heart hammered. Deer? Bear? Human? And then a waiting silence. Belinda tried to
calm her breathing, but it hitched faster. She was on the point of panic when
her dad’s voice came to her, calm and deep, saying: “Fear’s the wake-up call,
Beebee. That’s your body alerting you. But you don’t leave the alarm on once it
wakes you up. You shut it off and turn everything else on. All your senses. And
you deal with whatever.”
She pulled
herself together, sank down, and felt for a stout branch, finding only soft
duff. She inhaled, held the breath deep in her lungs, stood slowly, well off
the path, knees loose, hands ready. Then a rough voice from upslope yelled, a
rebel yell, whooping, powerful. The motorcycle engine snarled alive and
bouncing light threw tree shadows everywhere. Belinda stepped closer to a big
tree as the motorcycle light cut across the path. The bike roared past, and
then she was tackled, knocked to the ground, her knife hand trapped under her
back, which she arched to avoid cutting herself. She squirmed out and jumped to
her feet, preparing a swinging kick before a coughing voice snarled, “Jeez,
Belinda, notch it down!”
“What the
hell?” she demanded, gasping.
“Gunshots.
I heard gunshots,” Jack said as he pulled himself to his feet. “Two, maybe
three. Large-caliber pistol.”
“No way,”
Belinda said.
“You mean
that’s not what woke you up?” Jack said and then grabbed her arm. “Don’t tell
me you know those guys.”
“Of course
not!” Belinda said. “I heard the motorcycle engine. But I didn’t hear any
gunshots.”
“So you
heard the bike and you thought you’d check it out? I bet you thought it was
that guy from school.”
“And
you’re telling me you heard gunshots in the middle of the night? What’d you
think you’d do? Come out here and scold them to death?
“My job is
watching the perimeter,” Jack said. “I was watching the damn perimeter.”
Belinda
de-escalated. “You want to follow them or go home?”
“Go home,”
Jack said. “That motorcycle track isn’t going anywhere. We can see it better in
daylight.”
Belinda
pulled her flashlight out and pointed it down, enough illumination to see the
ground in front of them. The motorcycle’s noise had quickly faded to nothing as
it rounded the ridge below them.
As they
walked, she faced a thought she’d been circling for days. They lived with a
frail old woman who could do little more than dial the phone if something bad
were to happen. Out here, bad was big. A windstorm could knock a tree down on
their house or take out the power line. A mudslide could engulf them. A
wildfire could burn them out. Bad people could rob them. Emmy could wander off
and get lost in the woods. Belinda ran through the catalog then stopped
abruptly when Jack put a hand on her arm. They both heard the scrabbling, scratching
sounds. Belinda raised the light. In a narrow clearing, a cougar stood over a
carcass, a small one about thirty feet away. Her light flickered over it and
she realized how amped she must have been when she came this way and hadn’t
smelled it, the raw red death smell. The cougar didn’t stop feeding, its yellow
cat-eyes on them, unafraid.
Jack
knelt, felt around, and picked up a stone. He threw it at the cougar, which
hissed then grabbed the carcass and faded among the trees.
Susan Palmer is a multiple award-winning Oregon journalist
and fiction author whose short stories have appeared in Sunstone magazine and
anthologies including Imagination Fully Dilated. Her first novel, The
Tabernacle Bar, was set in Northern Utah's high country. Her new thriller, The
Booker Rebellion, brings Oregon's Coast Range to vivid life. A hiker, birder,
and embroiderer, she is also a licensed ham radio operator who once bounced her
voice off the moon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband who is far
more competent at ham operations.
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