George Byron Wright

Portland, Oregon. March, 1952. Michael Sanborn's estranged father has died from cancer as predicted. Six months earlier he had reluctantly agreed to bring Randolph Sanborn's body home from Florida to Oregon. The proviso being that Michael must travel with the funeral coach and along the way deliver seven letters to persons with unique histories in his father's life. Through each letter, Randolph posthumously bestows condemnation on one hand or seeks feigned forgiveness on the other. For Michael and the funeral coach driver, one Jonalynn Gates, it is a cross-country odyssey fraught with: anger, pain, empathy, revenge and a son's transformation. The unmasking of the father's life creates an unpredictable journey. It is the summation of a life.

It is January 1948. Nine-year-old Philip Wade and his family have been uprooted and moved to the small Eastern Oregon town of Baker City, where Philip's father, Kenneth Wade, will begin his career as a mortician. In the spring, the father hires a local recluse, Jack O'Brien, to help put a new roof on their house. Three weeks later, when a school teacher is found beaten to death, Jack O'Brien is accused of her murder. Kenneth Wade emerges as the only person who defends O'Brien--fully believing the man to be innocent. Philip is a spellbound spectator and narrator of his father's consuming struggle to save a man he barely knows. Conversely, he witnesses his mother's determination to keep the specter of violence from distorting the lives of her sons.Twisted into the father's fixation to wrest Jack O'Brien from custody is the relentless memory of a boyhood friend who, wrongly accused of a killing, hanged himself in his jail cell. This long-ago horror drives Kenneth Wade; he is caught up in the terrible present because of a past that will not let him go. Baker City 1948 is the story of a man's struggle for truth as told to us by the boy who was watching him.

Ashley and Ned have spoken perhaps six words over yet another dispirited evening meal when black-booted attackers kick in their kitchen door wielding aluminum bats and no explanations. Who is behind the heinous attack? Answer lie in the convoluted layers of Ned Pine's ordinary life. He has written it all down-the worst six months of his life.