Wednesday, December 07, 2011

What is Tom Lowe reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Tom Lowe, author of The Butterfly Forest.

His entry begins:
I'm currently reading Feast Day of Fools, by James Lee Burke. Burke is a lyrical storyteller, with a good sense of the human psychological condition and how close evil can live under the skin of some people.

The book I finally got around to reading is the first in the Stieg Larsson "Millennium Trilogy," The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked up because I'd seen the film trailer starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. Yep, the cross-promotion can work. I think Larsson did a solid job with this novel. It's...[read on]
About The Butterfly Forest:
It’s the subtle signs that Sean O’Brien notices first. The lingering glances that linger a moment too long. Glances that become stares. Stares that are quickly averted when the perpetrator knows he’s been spotted. O’Brien is minding his own business in a Walmart when he sees a predator stalking two women through the store. O’Brien has no idea that this morning in a Walmart will connect to a tragic morning seven decades earlier.

On a cool January morning in 1935, FBI agents surround a home secluded near the Ocala National Forest. By the end of the day, four thousand bullets rip through the house. The onslaught killed Ma Barker and one of her gangster sons. It is the most volatile and infamous shootout in the history of the FBI.

Seventy years later, two college students enter the forest to release the rare and endangered atala butterflies. The atala can only live in areas where the scarce coontie plants are found. They are found in the forest. Something else is hidden there – something that dates back to the deaths of Barker Gang members.

Sean O’Brien is led into this world from a Walmart parking lot where he follows a predator who is stalking two women. O’Brien prevents the abduction, and he opens the door to a new relationship. Also, he opens a dark door to an horror that lies secluded inside one of America's largest national forests. Three bodies are discovered, and police think an old man, a former San Quentin inmate, is responsible. O’Brien believes it’s something else, something hidden deep in the forest. To prove it, he’s forced to find it. He follows veiled tracks as they lead him farther into the woods where a horror, something more vicious than anything the Barker Gang ever did, awaits him.
Learn more about the book and author at Tom Lowe's website.

Lowe's previous Sean O'Brien mystery/thrillers include A False Dawn and The 24th Letter.

The Page 69 Test: The 24th Letter.

My Book, The Movie: The Butterfly Forest.

The Page 69 Test: The Butterfly Forest.

Writers Read: Tom Lowe.

--Marshal Zeringue