COEUR D’ALENE, IDAHO, is where people go to hide. Neo-Nazis. Corrupt politicians. Mining men with buried secrets.
In 1972, ninety-one men were killed in a mining ”accident” sparked by a fire lit nearly a mile underground: the mystery was never solved. After the rest escaped, only three miners survived underground.
More than twenty years later, Matt Worthson is a sheriff’s lieutenant and the disgraced son of mining hero and Sunshine Mine survivor Stanley Worthson. Matt expects to finish out his years on the force in quiet ignominy. But when the gruesomely dismembered body of a police chaplain is found at the swanky Coeur d’Alene Resort, Matt is tapped to find the murderer.
As Matt investigates the murder of his friend, he finds himself digging deep into the labyrinth of lies that seeps beneath the Coeur d’Alene region, including the Sunshine Mine disaster, and the truth behind his own broken family.
Genre: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Hard-BoiledCoeur d'Alene Waters is the first novel by Ned Hayes, author of the best-selling hhistorical novel Sinful Folk. It is a classic noir novel set in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The girl felt hope leave her as the road went dark. Night lapped across the valley and seeped over the mountains, an approaching tide. She turned her head and saw a light far away on the hill. Even as she looked, it faded into the depths. The darkness would swallow her.
Ahead of the car were only acres of water, an emptiness that roiled slowly against the forest and the mountains. She rolled the syllables around in her mouth, a name her father had taught her: Lake Coeur d’Alene.
Her father was gone. And when she peeked into the front seat, all she could see were the strange pair of muscled shoulders soiled with dirty ink, a blue-black smear.
She closed her eyes, willing this strange man to go away. She tried to go to sleep, tried to pretend that none of this had happened. But even as she closed her eyes, she remembered seeing him for the first time.
That afternoon, the man opened the car door quietly, as if he did not want anyone to see him. At first, she wondered if it were someone she should know, the man her momma talked about, the one who would come to get them both someday. But when she saw this man’s shoulders, she knew immediately this was not anyone she knew. This man had bent dragons written all over him, his skin was dirty as sin.
Heat waves vibrated up from the pavement, blurring the entrance of the building her father had entered. The dirty man looked around the parking lot quickly and then ran his hand over the steering wheel, finding the keys right where her father had left them. The girl watched the man with her eyes slit nearly shut, willing him not to get into the car.
But he did get in. He swung a small knapsack and a rolled-up sleeping bag onto the seat next to him and slammed the car door closed. He didn’t even look in the back seat, it was as if it already belonged to him. Then he turned the key. No one came out of the building.
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Portuguese
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Translation in progress.
Translated by André Weber
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Spanish
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Rocío Gutiérrez and Ana Gutiérrez Muñoz de la Torre
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