Charles Fergus is the author of seventeen books. The book review editor for Shooting Sportsman magazine, he has written for publications as various as Pennsylvania Game News,Audubon , Country Journal , Gray's Sporting Journal , Yale Review , and the New York Times . A Stranger Here Below, his first mystery, is influenced by the personal tragedy of his own mother's murder. Fergus lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom with his wife, the writer Nancy Marie Brown, and four Icelandic horses.http://www.charlesfergus.com
In Praise of A Stranger Here Below: "Some writers are natural story
tellers and have an instinct for the reader's interest. Others have
the ability to invoke mood or a sense of place. Still others are
able to handle landscape or have the ability to invoke precise
imagery. Every now and then you will find a writer who has all of
these qualities, and because of that they invoke the magic of
fiction. They make the chair you are sitting on disappear. Charles
Fergus is one of those writers, and A Stranger Here Below is one of
those books. - Craig Nova, author of All the Good Yale Men and The
Good Son"The kind of mystery Lee Child would have Jack Reacher
tackleif he placed a story in the 1830s." - Michael McMenamin,
author of The Liebold Protocol "Deeply imagined and intricately
plotted, A Stranger Here Below marries richly textured historical
fiction with the urgency of a mystery novel. Fergus knows certain
things, deep in the bone: horses, hunting, the folkways of rural
places, and he weaves this wisdom into a stirring tale." -
Geraldine Brooks, author of March and People of the Book "Imbued
with Michael Connelly's gumshoe skills and the vivid historical
descriptions of Charles Frazier, A Stranger Here Below is a stark
procedural set in the backwoods of Pennsylvania circa 1830. Charles
Fergus displays a deft touch in detailing the rough and tumble life
of everyday 19th-century America." - Brad Smith, author of The
Return of Kid Cooper and the Virgil Cain mysteries "With luminous
and deftly sketched prose, Charles Fergus takes us into an American
past that is both deeply familiar and utterly strange, through the
eyes and thoughts of a young man who is a stranger to his newly
chosen community. Sheriff Gideon Stoltz patiently unravels a series
of crimes and secrets, while also examining his own life, his past,
and the beauties and tragedies of life itself." - Jeffrey Lent,
author of Before We Sleep and In the Fall "A dark, engrossing tale
that introduces a decent, sympathetic hero in the young sheriff
Gideon Stoltz. The novel's special strength, however, is its
imaginative saturation in the community of Adamant, a violent,
haunted place of dreams and visions, a place as hard and
unforgiving as its name." - Castle Freeman, Jr., author of The
Devil in the Valley "In Gideon Stoltz, Charles Fergus has created a
unique 19th-century Eastern lawman who struggles not only with
wrongdoers but with his own griefs and travails. A Stranger Here
Below kept me reading late into the night." - Dan O'Brien, author
of The Indian Agent and Stolen Horses "Fergus puts you firmly in
Gideon Stoltz's rough-hewn world where a 'foreigner' with the wrong
accent has to watch his back even if he wears a sheriff's badge. A
cracking good mystery, and a window to the time when our young
country was still a dark and treacherous place." - Scott
Weidensaul, author of The First Frontier "Charles Fergus's gifts
for invoking time and place empower him to tell an irresistible
tale of extraordinary people and the past that haunts them." - Paul
Schullery, author of The Time Traveler's Tale and Diamond
Jubilee
"[A] rich novel of a distant time and a man who is "Othered" in
most aspects of his life . . . Although the book is clearly crime
fiction, it is equally an exploration of the soul in the presence
of death and wrongdoing. Which is, after all, what a "stranger here
below" can expect." -- The New York Journal of Books "A writer of
nonfiction about the natural world, Fergus brings his appreciation
for nature to this well-paced blend of mystery and western. Gideon
is a classic lawman, tough when he has to be but able to weep when
an influenza epidemic rips through town, leaving empty cradles in
its wake. An appealing debut that deserves a boost from
enthusiastic hand-sellers."--Booklist "Simply put, I loved this
novel. It works as a compelling and complex historical mystery, but
it's more. The characters struggle mightily with the evil around
them, trying to find purpose in a world that is frequently brutal
and unforgiving. But they carry on. They find meaning in their
connections to others, in song, in following dogs into thickets.
Their lives are perpetually caught between beauty and violence,
compassion and cruelty, love and hate. . . . The details, whether
of a grouse's feathers or a horse's gait or burning charcoal for an
iron mill, are flawless. Fergus has a curious naturalist's
attention to detail. This is a gem. I hope we see more of Gideon
Stoltz in the future." --Matthew Miller, Nature.com, The Nature
Conservancy blog "If you've grown tired of formulaic mysteries and
thrillers, then you're in for a treat with A Stranger Here Below .
. . The characters are built not from cliches, but through Fergus's
deft descriptions of their thoughts, desires, and secrets, all
while creating a tone that keeps the reader entranced . . . A
pleasure to read. -- Elaine Meder-Wilgus, WPSU's BookMark
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