About
I grew up in Arizona, then the Alaskan wilderness north of Juneau (where, I am fond of saying, we lived with whales in the front yard and bears in the back yard). Now I live beside a creek outside Durham, North Carolina, with my wife, Cynthia, and dog, Blue, both excellent companions. I built a cabin beside the creek, and in the mornings, when a book is in progress, I go down there to write. My debut novel is titled "A Dredging in Swann" and is published by Blackstone. In the afternoons, I throw pots, garden, read, discuss life (and plot, character, and pace) with Cynthia. I just finished a second Seb Creek novel entitled "Four Evenings." I also make pottery. In fact I earned a living doing that for forty years, part of that time making a line of porcelain jewelry. You can see it at bluebusstudiostore dot com. Essays can be found on my website at timgarvin,.com.
Featured Work
A Dredging in Swann
Twenty-two people die on the same day in Swann County, North Carolina. Twenty-one are lost when two Marine helicopters collide over a swamp on a military base. The twenty-second corpse is Leo Sackler, found hung inside the ancient well he had been digging out. Sackler had just been released from prison and is famous in Swann county, not only because of his forty-year-old crime, an axe murder, but because even before the governor granted him executive clemency, he inherited more than fifteen million dollars from a reclusive spinster.
The Leo Sackler case falls to Seb Creek, a former Marine recovering from PTSD, now a detective on the sheriff’s investigation squad. What falls to Cody Cooper, a Venus flytrap poacher camping in the swamps, is a case of stinger missiles. In a stoned haze, Cody, a formerly homeless soldier also ravaged by PTSD, sees the missiles drop from one of the choppers’ cargo nets and buries them on an island.
As the investigations proceed, one by Seb Creek, the other by the frantic federal government, Seb finds himself drawn into both. The trail involves the forty year old murder, drone surveillance of a hog farm, an outdoor gas chamber, a mystery object at the bottom of Leo’s well, and finally a third murder and an ancient testament. In the end, both investigations connect and resolve together.
A Dredging in Swann is a page-turner that deals with themes of war, love, justice, and, in the end, with healing.
