The Judas Hills

It’s the 1950s, and just when Terry Belshaw – the unlikely hero of Peter Trower’s two previous novels, Grogan’s Cafe 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