"Stone Scar"

T. J. Tao is the pen name of Michael J. Orr (wordsmithmojo.com). Now based in southern Idaho, he and his family survived the Camp Fire. In "Burn Scar," he transplants what happened in Paradise to a town called Genna (Maltese, he says, for "Paradise"); the novelist's blaze starts in Bear County near Bonneville Road and so is dubbed the Bonn Fire.

One of the characters in that book, James Aloysius Augustine, is a man with a checkered past starting over in Genna, a man who discovers the plot by one Gavin David to use corrupt town officials to drill for gold after the fire. David escapes and James is left to figure out a life purpose.

Not to worry. His story continues in "Stone Scar" ($16.99 in paperback from WordsmithMojo Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) but the novel itself begins in 1805 with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the midst of their famous expedition. They are in what is now central Idaho, meeting with Shoshone Chief Cameahwait, brother of Sacagawea. Though these facts are part of the historical record, what Lewis and Clark find next is most certainly not. 

Days later, their Shoshone guide, Toby, directs the explorers to what Toby calls "the river of no return." Will, on a side mission from Thomas Jefferson himself to find the rumored "Lost City of Gold," clambers over rocks for a look, but they give way and he tumbles into the river. Then he "saw it for the first time; a scar burrowed into the stone face of a giant wall leaving an opening the width of the river and nearly level with the surface. A stony beast swallowing the river."

Will and Meri find the river leads into a fantastical chamber, bathed in a golden glow, sporting strange machinery, a portal to a most unfortunate encounter with Gavin David's tyrannical ancestor.

Alternating chapters take the reader to 2019, when James and Boise State University archaeologist Stuart Angeline discover the same chamber, activate its mechanism, and eventually find their purpose in life beyond what they could have imagined. Dan Brown fans, especially, will enjoy the page-turning romp and be impatient for the next in the series.