Red Jacket

Woods Cop mystery author Joseph Heywood takes readers to an era when people had to be as hard as the lives they lived. Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigans first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the states industrial center. Featuring a stunning array of characters, fascinating historical detail, and Heywoods trademark writing about life and work in Michigans wild, Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation-all apparently designed by mine owners to deny natures bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union. The strikes violence culminates in the Italian Hall disaster, during which a man allegedly yells fire in a small building with several hundred people inside. In the panic, 73 people are crushed or die of suffocation, the majority of them the children and wives of striking miners at the hall for a Christmas party.Even with good people dying, the Michigan governor refuses to take sides. Should Lute Bapcat?