Sgt. Steve Maharidge, like many of his generation, hardly ever talked about the war. The only sign he#8217;d served in it was a single black and white photograph of himself and another soldier tacked to the wall of his basement workshop. After Steve Maharidge#8217;s death, his son Dale, now an adult, began a twelve-year quest to understand his father#8217;s preoccupation with the photo. What had happened during the battle for Okinawa, and why had his father remained silent about his experiences and the man in the picture, Herman Mulligan? In his search for answers, Maharidge sought out the survivors of Love Company, many of whom had never before spoken so openly and emotionally about what they saw and experienced on Okinawa.In Bringing Mulligan Home, Maharidge delivers an affecting narrative of war and its aftermath, of fathers and sons, with lessons for the children whose parents are returning from war today.

Zoe Vanderlip is missing. The Ark is empty. And nobody on McGee Ridge can agree about what exactly happened to her.

McGee Ridge, earthquake-rattled and clinging to the thousand-foot cliffs of the Northern California coast, is nestled in one of a very few truly wild places left in the Lower 48. It is also home to a band of off-grid outlaws who vanished behind the famed Redwood Curtain in the 1960s and whose time there is swiftly coming to an end.

Will Specter, a burned-out journalist for the Los Angeles Times, arrived here to build a wilderness cabin for himself in the ’90s, after spending a decade as a war correspondent. In a community that subsists mainly off illegal cannabis farming, Will is an outlier. So too is Zoe Vanderlip, the revered matriarch of the original 60s settlers, whose adult son Klaus is one of the largest growers in the region. Unlike nearly everyone else, neither Will nor Zoe has ever grown marijuana, but when Zoe suddenly goes missing from her home–a large hand-built structure known as the Ark–the industry’s competing forces can no longer be ignored.

Pairing up with Daniel Likowski, a principled but mysterious grower whose business has been crushed by legalization, Will finds himself swept into a world of lost idealism and desperate loners, mobsters and corporate shell companies, violence and hypocrisy, all operating beneath the canopy of an ancient forest teetering at the very edge of the continent.

Spurned on both by his journalistic zeal and a strange love for the place and its people, Will begins his investigation as a journey to understand not just what happened to Zoe but to all of them.

In this atmospheric rural noir, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge’s debut novel plunges readers into a country that has existed for decades beyond the bounds of America-at-large but nevertheless reflects the essential conflicts of our divided culture.