It is pouring rain in the Gridley area on that fateful day when Bettis and his patrol car simply disappear. More than a decade passes, and the case grows cold.
So begins "The Case Of The Missing Game Warden: A Henry Glance Mystery" ($16.95 in paperback from Coffeetown Press; also for Amazon Kindle), the first novel by Steven T. Callan (steventcallan.com). The Redding-area resident spent his high school days in Orland, graduated from Chico State, then in Shasta County concluded a thirty-year career as a game warden.
His two previous non-fiction books include the award-winning "The Game Warden's Son" and "Badges, Bears, and Eagles: The True-Life Adventures of a California Fish and Game Warden."
Now, in novelistic form, he turns his attention to a young Temecula man named Henry Glance, whose baseball-scholarship hopes are dashed in the late Sixties when his hand is injured in an accident. Stanford is out, but Chico State College beckons.
As a kid, Henry had stopped two goose poachers near his Southern California home and heard about Bettis' strange disappearance from the game warden who arrived. Eventually Henry himself becomes a warden, assigned to the Gridley area and Bettis' old territory. Blessed with good sense (and a photographic memory), the twenty-something warden is convinced he can solve the mystery and bring some closure to Martha.
Callan's story is a fascinating blend of detective work and chance encounters, and the kind of intuition needed to turn those encounters into actionable evidence. The issue is not so much whodunit but what it takes to convince a jury. The procedural aspects of the case illuminate the life of the warden set against a backdrop of 1970s Chico--and Gridley, where Henry and his bride live, ready to take on what comes next.
