More about Rips...

On his way home to a romantic island paradise on one of the world's great rivers two and a half centuries ago, Everett, a proud and decent St. Lawrence riverman, happens upon the bleak smoldering ruins of a burned-out cabin on the shores of Lake Champlain. He sees a lovely widow and her son gaze in stunned silence at yet another loss from a brutal, chaotic French and Indian War tearing apart North America.

With no place to turn, they join Everett who offers them hope of sanctuary, kindness, and protection on his faraway island. But treachery, betrayal, hatred, chaos, and brutality divide Americans, Canadians, the British, French, and dozens of desperate native tribes as they all claw for survival during an era that shaped the continent.

The war soon visits Everett's Island, bringing a French deserter followed by a cast of no-accounts, brutes, Gilles, a charming French Lieutenant, Indian friends and foes, and a series of catastrophes that wrench apart the family yet again. Rips is the story of how these characters, through guile, desperation, extraordinary toughness and determination overcome their losses and recapture their lost sanctuary.

The French and Indian War was, at its essence, about the theft of a continent, and thievery was its guiding metaphor. The widow Ella is kidnapped by Indians, who often captured white settlers to replenish their numbers after devastating European diseases decimated their tribes. Her captivity, she discovers is filled with unexpected twists. French naval officers conscript Everett as a river pilot to guide them along the treacherous shoals, channel rips, rock ledges, and ice flows of the huge and ever-dangerous river. Everett's former lover Lucy, the daughter of a native trapper, is adopted by a French Missionary who falls in love with her and out of grace with his own God. But a tribe of Indians he is trying to convert have their own notions about the meaning of death, dignity, and sin visited upon them by the priests they considered devils. Jamie, Ella's adolescent son, learns from Everett's Indian friend Gordon, a brilliant warrior, philosopher, and unrivaled riverman that loyalty, friendship, extraordinary patience, and oneness with nature offer a path to survival and ascendancy in this otherwise vicious world.

Torn apart by the wildly unpredictable forces of men, river, climate, romance, and an accurate rendering of history, the characters of Rips fight for a sense of order, peace, and wisdom in a novel rippling with kinetic energy. They represent our dark roots and still simmering resentments, packed into a wrenching gauntlet of adventures and uplifting acts of heroism seldom seen in contemporary fiction.

For excerpts from Rips