Rod Collins

When we came back out of the cookhouse, someone yelled, "Your house is on fire!" and pointed to the small logged-off canyon that separated our place from the other houses in the camp. I remember a column of black smoke, probably from the tar paper the mill owners used for roofing. By the time we drove back to the house, it was pretty much gone. Everything my parents owned was destroyed: clothes, dishes, hunting rifles, fishing poles, canned goods,...

John Bitter scanned the hilltops with his field glasses, blaming unfamiliar territory for his uneasy feelings, but past experience taught him not to ignore his hunches. Something's brewing, he thought. Following Lee's surrender of the Northern Army of Virginia to Grant on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox, Captain John Bitter of Abiqua Creek, Oregon musters out of the 40th Missouri. A loner, Bitter plans a quick ride home over the Oregon Trail. The good...

The Reverend Thomas Jefferson Wildish leads back to a high-ranking jihadist in Portland, Oregon. It also leads to a confrontation between Sheriff Blair and fifty bikers bent on freeing their friends, "or we'll tear your town apart." In Portland, FBI Special Agents Wilcox and Brandt investigate a tip about a cargo ship container sitting on Portland's Pier 6 dock. As they unravel the mystery behind the container, the web expands to include jihadists,...

Someone is helping themselves to funds at the Land and Cattleman's Bank, and senior teller Susan McDowell knows who. But shy report this to the police when weaving her web if simple extortion will yield a better return? Elsewhere, an unrelated suspicious death leads to a manhunt and the capture of confessed killer Bill Casey. When Oregon Lake County Sheriff Bud Blair reads the autopsy report, he begins to suspect that someone other than Casey...