Paul Wood can’t believe it. While hiking in the Himalayas he comes upon a fellow trekker, sitting against an abandoned Nepalese building—his skull crushed, and for good measure, a pair of Swiss Army knives plunged into his eyes.But the real horror of this scene is that Paul has been here before. Laura, his girlfriend, dead on the beach in Cameroon, her eyes horribly mutilated.

In a debut novel that travels deep into the little known culture of young backpackers searching for their next hit of adventure, writer and world traveler Jon Evans has created a memorable twenty-something hero whose high-altitude smarts and high-tech Internet savvy propel him to solve a terrible crime.

An irresistible, action-packed read that begs for a sequel—and a movie—Dark Places is the ideal summer travel destination: you’ll never want to leave.

Jim Westergard was born in Ogden, Utah in 1939. He was educated at a variety of colleges and universities in California, Arizona and Utah where he completed his BFA and MFA at Utah State. Westergard moved to Red Deer in 1975 and taught at Red Deer College until his retirement in 1999. He became a Canadian citizen in 1980.

Jim Westergard has been creating prints from wood engravings since university days in the late 60s, but had never completed a book-length collection until the original limited letterpress edition of Mother Goose Eggs. The first engraving for this project was finished in 1999. Then, after a four-year struggle which included an unexpected hernia operation and reprinting the press-sheets a second time with helpful hints from Crispin Elsted of the Barbarian Press (Mission, BC), Mother Goose Eggs was finally bound and released in a deluxe edition of eighty copies in 2003.

Westergard continues to create wood engravings on his cantankerous old VanderCook SP-15 proof press which he has affectionately named the 'Spanish Fly'.

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"You're hooked.... [A] pacy thriller for the 21st century." (The Times (UK))