Kate Wilhelm

The Sumner family can read the signs: the droughts and floods, the blighted crops, the shortages, the rampant diseases and plagues, and, above all, the increasing sterility all point to one thing. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains gives them the ideal place to survive the coming breakdown, and their wealth and know-how gives them the means. Men and women must clone themselves for humanity to survive. But what then?

In Kate Wilhelm's latest crime novel, a small Oregon town is rocked by a wheels-within-wheels case of art, fraud, and murder. Silver Bay, Oregon, a small coastal resort town with nearly a thousand residents, is home to three generations of women: Marnie, the long-widowed owner of a small gift shop; Van, her granddaughter, who is about to graduate medical school; and Stef, mercurial, difficult, and a brilliant artist who refuses to sell her work. When Stef discovers that Dale Oliver--the latest husband/paramour in a very long line--is trying to sell her work behind her back, she puts a stop to it and threatens to do the same to him. Shortly thereafter, Stef dies in an accident in her studio, and Dale shows up with a signed contract granting him the right to sell her work. Convinced that Stef was murdered in order to steal her artwork, Marie and Van--grandmother and granddaughter--decide to do whatever is necessary to see that Dale doesn't get away with any of it. This includes enlisting the help of the new stranger in town, Tony, a former New York City cop, who might be the only one who can prove it was murder and bring the killer to justice.

"Wilhelm really knows students and knows how to teach them to craft a professional story."-The Oregonian Part memoir, part writing manual, Storyteller is an affectionate account of how the Clarion Writers' Workshop began, what Kate Wilhelm learned, and how she passed a love of the written word on to generations of writers. Includes writing exercises and advice. A Hugo and Locus award winner.

Before becoming one of today's most intriguing and innovative mystery writers, Kate Wilhelm was celebrated as a writer of science fiction, acclaimed for classics like The Infinity Box and The Clewiston Test. Now one of her most famous novels returns to print, the spellbinding story of an isolated post-holocaust community determined to preserve itself, and civilization, through a perilous experiment in cloning.