Whoo?

When private eye John Denson travels to Washington State to clear a client of a small-time marijuana charge, he finds himself in the midst of a turf war between the mighty logging industry and the imperiled spotted owl. When a spotted owl is found murdered—strangled, to be precise—Denon's sometime partner Willie Prettybird, a Cowlitz Indian, thinks that the Spirit Animals want Denson to investigate the killing. That's when things start to get cosmic. First the Corpus Deecti is misplaced...then the beautiful Jennie Maclvar of the Fish and Wildlife Service, who was determined to fin the killer, is murdered...

One thing's for certain: this is much more complicated than a simple marijuana case. In fact, Denson may be the next victim....

Richard Hoyt, a graduate of the University of Oregon, is a former fellow of the Washington Journalism Center and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Hawaii. He served as U.S. army counterintelligence agent, wrote for daily newspapers in Honolulu, and was a stringer for Newsweek magazine. He taught journalism at the University of Maryland and at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Or.

Hoyt is the author of the John Denson mysteries, the James Burlane thrillers and numerous other novels of adventure, espionage and suspense including two under the pseudonym of Nicholas van Pelt. In researching and writing in more than two dozen countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, he has ridden trains across the Soviet Union and riverboats down the Amazon. He now lives in the Philippines.