It's the 1950s, and just when Terry Belshaw -- the unlikely hero of Peter Trower's two previous novels, Grogan's Café and Dead Man's Ticket -- vows never to log again, his circumstances change and he needs to return to BC's backwoods to get a stake, and fast.

His newest adventures -- gripping and ominous -- are detailed in The Judas Hills, in which Terry is hired out to a remote logging camp in the brooding shadow of Mesachie Mountain. Trower takes the most memorable loggers he ever met during his own career in the woods and casts them all in this fast-paced thriller: from Garfield "Timber Wolf" Hobson, the tenacious camp boss who wants to harvest all the trees from the Mesachie hills at any cost, to Albert "Ox" Tully, a hulking and menacing logger who reads philosophy and poetry in his spare time, to Gordy "Grandaddy Tough" Dower, Hobson's formidable foreman.

As the story unfolds, it soon becomes clear that what these loggers face is more than the usual dose of danger they find on the job. Mesachie Mountain and the whole valley seem to be under a curse with supernatural forces at work. A half-mad camp watchman, a series of unlucky logging accidents, an abandoned Aboriginal village and a ghost camp all point toward a sinister mystery that must be solved. The story moves from one inevitable crisis to another and concludes with a nerve-shattering climax.

"It isn't often you come across a poetic voice that truly reflects the history and feeling of the land and its folk - a poet of the people."

-The Globe and Mail

Peter Trower was born at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, England, in 1930. He immigrated to British Columbia at age ten, following the death of his test-pilot father in a plane crash. His mother married a West Coast pulp mill superintendent who drowned soon after. Trower quit school to work as a logger for twenty-two years. Since 1969, he has published more than a dozen books of poetry--from which poems were selected for Haunted Hills & Hanging Valleys: Selected Poems 1969-2004--and contributed to several issues of Raincoast Chronicles and Vancouver Magazine. Poetry collections such as Moving Through Mystery (1969), Between the Sky and the Splinters (1974), The Alders and Others (1969) and Ragged Horizons (1978) express his admiration and resentment at the magisterial power of nature. He has written three novels about the West Coast logging life: Grogan's Cafe (1993), Dead Man's Ticket (1996) and The Judas Hills (2000). In 2002, Trower was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and had his name added to the BC Writers' Walk of Fame outside the Vancouver Public Library in recognition of his contribution to BC literature. He lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia with his faithful cat, Hangup.

Peter Trower's profile page