In Washington State, the government secretly plants hundreds of willow trees along the Columbia River near a nuclear plant...
In Oregon, a Deputy Sheriff dies in a mysterious car explosion...
In the Nation's Capital, an "Imminent Threat" report goes missing...
Rotated stateside and assigned to Homeland Security, Major Jake Hawthorne battles PTSD as he struggles to adapt to civilian life. Warned off investigating a friend’s missing report, Jake rebels and returns home to the Pacific Northwest only in time to see his friend die in a fiery demolition derby. Jake alone believes it is murder, and now he is the next target of someone anticipating his every move. Estranged from his family, Jake turns to a native shaman to unlock cryptic rock art clues to the murder and follow their trail across the high-desert landscape. The stakes rise when Jake uncovers more than a murder. He races the clock to expose a band of mercenaries tangled in a conspiracy sixty years in the making, as the land he loves teeters on the brink of an ecological Armageddon.
Blending scientific fact with fast-paced action, Coyote Willows is a modern day thriller filled with murder, mercenaries and mysticism wrapped in the virulent legacy of the western hemisphere’s most deadly nuclear complex.
"Coyote Willows is a fast paced, complex thriller with an original plot that kept me reading until the end."
--- Phillip Margolin, New York Times bestselling author of "Woman with a Gun"
"In Coyote Willows, Sharon Appleman serves up a breakneck thriller rich with human fallibility and courage. The story bounds along, unrelenting and painfully genuine, through a landscape drawn with a seasoned hand and so real you feel yourself lost in it. But it's in Jake Hawthorne, a protagonist as raw as an unhealed wound, that Appleman's deft touch really shines. Coyote Willows is that rare kind of page-turner that hangs onto you long after you're finished reading -- a powerful story as profound as it is gripping."
--- Bill Cameron, Spotted Owl Award winning author of "County Line"
