For "old coot" Jack Jenkins, a man, as they say, with a past, Alturas suits just fine. He's been pretty much anonymous for a decade now. Odd jobs. A few hookups with Liz, one of the older clerks at the local grocery store. Mostly keeping to himself at home, "your standard double-wide, laid up on cinderblocks, with worn cedar steps leading to the front door and an illegal stove in the den."
A ringing cellphone at three in the morning will change everything. Ridge-area novelist Brian T. Marshall (briantmarshallauthor.com) is there and brings the reader deep into the heart of a man who seeks to escape history but who will find his future depends on it.
"A Stone Bled Dry" ($12 in paperback from misspelled press; also for Amazon Kindle) is a deeply moving exploration of the sometimes violent cost of love. Jack had hooked up with Lenora back in their using days and had a child. Lenora is on the phone with news that (once again) she's entering a program to get clean. Oh, and 14-year-old Jewell is on a Greyhound from LA headed his way.
Jewell? "A granddaughter," Jack tells Phil, a widower retired from Chico State. "Her mom, our daughter, died when she was still just a baby. We got stuck raising her." Yet when Jewell arrives, a beauty blossoming into womanhood, Jack realizes she is "a version of himself. Another chance to get things right. Because if Jack and Lenora had both faced a test, it was one they'd clearly failed, and the only way to redeem the loss was to help Jewell triumph. For this is the way that spirit works."
When Jewell gets twisted up in a struggle among generations on the Reservation, what will Jack do to protect her life? Stony hearts bleed, they do, and readers will hold on tight until the very end.
