Deep Creek »

Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews, who live and work in Princeton, New Jersey. Under their own names, they have published eighteen nonfiction books on American history, literature, and public issues.

Idaho Territory, June 1887. A small-town judge takes his young daughter fishing, and she catches a man. Another body surfaces, then another. The final toll: over 30 Chinese gold miners brutally murdered. Their San Francisco employer hires Idaho lawman Joe Vincent to solve the case.

Soon he journeys up the wild Snake River with Lee Loi, an ambitious young company investigator, and Grace Sundown, a métis mountain guide with too many secrets. As they track the killers across the Pacific Northwest, through haunted canyons and city streets, each must put aside lies and old grievances to survive a quest that will change them forever.

Deep Creek is a historical thriller inspired by actual events and people: the 1887 massacre of Chinese miners in remote and beautiful Hells Canyon, the middle-aged judge who went after their slayers, and the sham race-murder trial that followed. This American tragedy was long suppressed and the victims nearly forgotten; Deep Creek teams history and imagination to illuminate how and why, in a seamless, fast-moving tale of courage and redemption, loss and love. A dazzling new novel for fans of Leif Enger, Lisa See, and Ivan Doig.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

Deep Creek is a gripping, spooky historical novel…highly ambitious and compelling, much more complex than it might appear from paraphrase. The dual authorship of this novel [Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews] may have something to do with the fact that it's twice as good as it might have been otherwise.