Death in a Live Forest

“I liked Death in a Live Forest a lot. I read the whole thing in one sitting and I think you’re on to something. This book has a lot of vitality, plenty of really good stuff, and great characters in Bouchee, Liz, Miskis, The Count, Sam and The Dog. Death in a Live Forest has energy, and a fine madness (just like Holt).”
- Jon Jackson, author of No Man’s Dog

Very little comes easy in the West, not even murder. Here, Ed Bouchee, a small town private detective living on the northern high plains, is asked to investigate a gruesome murder. From that moment on nothing is as it seems. Up is down and white fades to black. Bouchee and his headstrong Springer spaniel companion, The Dog, wander the slightly mean, out-of-kilter streets of Biederbeck, and the lonesome, often terrifying, mountain backroads of central Montana in search of Mark Grace’s killer. Along the way eccentric Biederbeck luminaries both help and hinder the often-bewildered detective. Was Grace dispatched to protect an illegal trout netting operation? Was he killed in a squabble over a marginal timber-cutting contract? Or was the reason much darker, much crazier?

John Holt is the author of 19 published books including Stalking Trophy Browns, Montana Fly Fishing Adventures, Yellowstone Drift – Floating the Past in Real Time, Arctic Aurora – Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, Hunted: A Novel, Coyote Nowhere – In Search of America’s Last Frontier, and Fly Fishing Adventures – Montana. His work has appeared in such publications as Men’s Journal, Fly Rod & Reel, The Denver Post, American Cowboy, Audubon, Jeep Magazine, Big Sky Journal, E – The Environmental Magazine, Art of Angling Journal, and Outside. He and his wife, photographer Ginny Holt, live in Livingston, Montana.