MONTEITH'S MOUNTAINS

The Southern Appalachian Mountains at the turn of the 20th century provide the backdrop for this dark tale of cultural transformation, serial murder, love, loss, and ultimate triumph in a land on the edge of irrevocable change.

Walker Tom Monteith lives by his own laws, makes his own rules, and loves the beautiful women he murders. But more than anything, Walker Tom loves the Great Smoky Mountains. He built his home from their trees, grows his food in their dirt, takes water from the pure springs that bubble out of their rocks, hunts and fishes their bounty. They are his comfort, his solitude, and his refuge.

They are his mountains.

Taylor Henry, the independent young woman who dreams of adventure in the high mountains, signs on as manager of Line Camp # 9, a logging camp that houses and feeds the timber crews who are cutting the virgin forests. It is there that Taylor finds the life she's been seeking and begins to dream of even greater mountains to climb.

Tick Henry, who spent years tracking bad men in the Oklahoma Territory, comes home to the mountains and encounters an evil that will ultimately take him years to confront. Along the way he finds hope, renewal, and the ghosts of his own past when he comes face to face with the daughter he barely knows.

Goodman Brant has left his Mohawk home in Ontario and journeyed to the land of the Cherokees seeking not only his past, but his future. While crossing a ridge one morning in early May of 1902, he witnesses an event that sets this tale in motion and ultimately creates the only ending that can satisfy our sense of justice.

The author ties together old mountain legends, the historical record of the developing logging industry, and research into the history of his own family with a vivid imagination and the ability to create events as frighteningly real as today's news.

Skip Brooks comes to his first novel down a road as winding as the mountain trails he writes about. He grew up in Maryland and graduated from Baltimore Community College in 1963. He's always been a musician, trained on classical piano from age seven, played in local bands in the 1950's and performed as a solo act in local Folk Music Coffee Houses in the Early sixties. He moved to New York in 1965 and worked in the music business there until 1970 when the music brought him south to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. There he continued to play music and started a family business. He left Gatlinburg in 1978 to Oxford, Mississippi and finished college at The University of Mississippi, graduating in 1980. He worked in Media-Operations at Ole Miss, producing and directing remote sports productions and in 1986 moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he lives with his wife, two kids, three dogs and a cat. He began writing in the early nineties.

Brooks started Monteith's Mountains in 1995, at least partially in response to a search for family. That trail led him to the southern Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee and North Carolina, into the remote areas of what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and to characters that refused to stay in the past.