Libri GmbH Going up Cripple Creek: Being an Account of the Summer of 1973 in Sumac County, in Which o Number of People Went Up Cripple Creek and Came Back Down i

In the summer of 1973, while the nation sits glued to the Watergate hearings on television, game warden Royce Tackett polices the backwoods of fictional Sumac County. When a flood of suburban city dwellers arrives in canoes following a hit Hollywood film, local entrepreneur Buck Varner attempts to turn the river into a tourist attraction, complete with a hired banjo player picking "Cripple Creek" at dusk for atmosphere. The fun sours when tourists and officials begin turning up dead in impossible locations: a dentist found sitting dry on a springhouse step, an ATF agent perched sixty feet up a tulip poplar tree, a young banjo player submerged in eleven inches of water, and a state dam surveyor lined up on a dry hillside. Every victim is bone-dry on the outside, yet every coroner's ruling comes back the same: drowning in icy, upper-creek spring water. Lurking above the bodies is an eerie, phantom banjo tune playing a distinct third-string technique-a song once played by Royce's father, a Prohibition revenue agent who walked up Cripple Creek in 1932 and never returned. To stop the body count and protect the hollow from a destructive dam project, Royce must hike up Hogback Mountain to confront the mountain's secrets and face the ghost lingering in Aunt Vashti's springhouse guest book.