Saturday, November 28, 2015

from THE ISLAND OF ANCIENT LIGHT ( Novel in Progress)

Over the past summer and fall I have been working on THE ISLAND OF ANCIENT LIGHT,  the fifth novel in the Liam Dutra New England mystery series.

 I finished the first draft a few days ago,  and I would like to celebrate by sharing a short excerpt here.
This scene finds Liam, a historian and writer with a penchant for stirring  up troublesome old secrets, at the beginning of a quest that takes him along the shores of Lake Champlain:






  …The morning brought good omens for my excursion up the lake in the Sea Nymph. They were bird omens, pretty much my favorite kind.
 Three massive great blue herons pterodactyl-ed over me in the silver-gray mist down at the marina in the quiet morning— the first herons I’d seen all season.
  A few minutes later, with the fourteen-footer and 50-horse Evinrude outboard chugging out into the smooth and silver lake passage, the mist breaking up to reveal a soft summer-blue sky above, I spotted an osprey, the mostly white fish hawk patterned with dark brown--massive, crook-winged, and powerful-- winging directly overhead.
 Both the heron and osprey feel like familiars to me, and sometimes they seem like guides in my line of work as a historian, writer, researcher.
  The heron knows how to hunt wisely and calmly: waiting and waiting in stillness at water's edge, then grabbing its prey decisively when the moment arrives.
  The osprey is always in motion, seeking its meal from a long view high above, then-- after finding it-- diving suddenly, explosively, into the water’s surface tension; grabbing with sharp talons and pulling up the dripping, struggling prey.
  I’ve found that both methods can work well when investigation and exploration—-the finding of lost things, lost stories— is the mission at hand....

    - excerpt from THE ISLAND OF ANCIENT LIGHT, a novel in progress by Kevin Macneil Brown (Coming in autumn  of 2016.)


                                                     

                                         
               The Liam Dutra Series is available in print and kindle editions at amazon.com:

       


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