Dead Man's Ticket

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From the back cover:

Meet Jerry Belshaw, the unlikely hero of an uncommon novel-half logger's story, half flair thriller, all page-turner.

It's 1952, the golden era of logging on the West Coast, and Jerry is a young, healthy guy making good money as a cold-deck chaser, when he isn't hanging around the Vancouver water-front partying his stake away with all the other bush apes. Life is pretty sweet, until his best friend Frankie dies mysteriously, a complete stranger punches him out at the funeral, and two cops rough him up in a back alley for no reason.

Jerry is determined to solve the mystery, but first he has to head back to camp in Frankie's place-which means he's hiring out on a dead man's ticket, very bad luck to a logger-and he has to take one last wild swing through Skid Road, going head to head with wrecked winos and junkie loggers, sexy women and cut-rate hookers, cool cats and zoot-suited rounders, and even his own doppelganger.

Peter Trower is the author of eight published books of poetry and Grogan's Cafe, a novel of West Coast logging life published in 1993. His articles and poems have appeared in a variety of periodicals, and he appeared as himself in the JV movie The Diary of Evelyn Lay. Trower was a logger for twenty-two years.

A reader gives the following review:

I picked this book up on the Vancouver ferry as something to read by a local author. It turned out to be a very enjoyable read. Trower writes in an almost autobiographical style that makes you feel that the characters are real people doing real things. The topics covered in the book seem to be very down-beat--the endless cycle of logger's lives between Skid Road, the Logging Camps, Booze and Heroin, but the book is far from down beat. The characters are well developed and believable; they are treated with respect and each play an interesting roll in the story. The story-line weaves about through themes that let the author illustrate the life and times very well, and in the end conclude with an ending that fits the story yet is creative enough to make the reader happy. All in all, a very good book about an odd-slice-of-life that is interesting to see recorded.

The review above is by vintner Kent Rasmussen. It was originally posted to Amazon.com, but we have been given permission to post it here by Mr. Rasmussen.

Our thanks to another Kent Rasmussen (an author of books on Mark Twain) for helping us to track down the author of the above review.