Monthly Archives: January 2011

Deadly Hatch

Coming in 2011 – The Deadly Hatch – a new Miles Cavanaugh mystery

Excerpt – all rights copyrighted, 2010, Michael Hamilton

“What is it about the coming sunrise that makes the new day yet to be lived full of promise and possibility.  Where does the hope linger in each of us that the new dawn will bring something fresh, something undiscovered?  In the darkness, before the coming light gains quickly on the day, not pausing for a second to stop and rest awhile, I have felt giddy with excitement and apprehension.  Maybe even blessed, not in any religious sense, because I don’t believe in any one man’s religion, but more thankful to marvel at the colors and clarity of the moment while not knowing how the day will turn out. I would soon discover that no one in the Eastern Washington town of Cascade could have imagined what this day would bring, how it would turn out, as the sun broke above the horizon in a fiery blaze of glowing reds, smeared like a streak of paint across the new born sky.  It was an eerie scene. Thin, funneled shaped clouds with jagged edges, looking like an army of red tinged daggers, marched in columns ahead of the rising sun.  Someone up early for work or school or just coming home from the graveyard shift at Braxton Fertilizer must have thought to themselves, “Red Sky in the Morning Sailors Warning”, maybe even said it aloud.  But if they did, no one could remember hearing anything of the sort.  Too bad. “