The Long Slide
by Blair Oliver, Ph.D. and
Peter Soliunas
ISBN: 978-1-935444-58-9
Long Slide is a novel by Blair Oliver and Peter Soliunas. Coming February, 2010.
"Dazzling debuts are rare as stardust. And phew-oh, The Long Slide is glittering, one of those novels I'd like to quote whole chunks of. Here are two of my favourite lines: There were two kinds of drunks, the ones who needed another beer to keep settled and the ones who used that extra beer to get unsettled. I was always the former. And, A bitterer pill was never swallowed in the name of pride…. And that's just in the first ten pages! The Long Slide is a blast of sheer nitro-plotting with a narrator who's so full on, you feel you've known him always. This novel announces a huge new voice; it's a book that's going to be on everyone's list by the end of the year."
--Ken Bruen, author of The Guards, Once Were Cops, and London Boulevard
"Clever, smart, cynical dialogue...narrative I'd give an arm to be able to write.... The Long Slide is a wild ride through the new wild, wild west with gunfights, open mine shafts, a dame to kill (or be killed) for and one man's journey back to himself and trout fishing. An excellent debut."
--Charlie Stella, author of Jimmy Bench-Press, Shakedown, and Mafiya
The Long Slide is a crime novel set in the new, roadside West, where bison graze alongside billboards of bison and even accountants pack heat. Henry Gavin, the narrator, is a bamboo fly rod aficionado and editor of the Copper Falls Gazette, the only newspaper in a dying, Colorado mining town. Copper, the town's last best resource, is also its curse. The land and its waters are beautiful, but deadly.
Much of Gavin's newspaper work involves burying all news concerning his old friend and fishing partner, Raymond Bresler, Copper Falls' most vocal environmental activist, in deference to his publisher's request to keep the paper mine-friendly. Gavin's first love left him to become Bresler's wife, but the two men managed to remain friends until Bresler tried to bankrupt the mine by poisoning their home river with cyanide. Burying Bresler-related news becomes impossible when the activist, who's also heir to the town's copper-tainted health spas, disappears during a camping trip with his son. The town loses people each year to abandoned shafts, but Gavin realizes Bresler's disappearance isn't routine. When he starts following the story, he's shot at and beaten. Instead of discouraging him, these incidences steel his resolve to find his old friend.
The trip takes Gavin along some of the West's great rivers, through exclusive ski resorts, cleaned-up, tourist-friendly bars, and deep woods. He encounters professional hitmen, jaded environmentalists, his publisher's dangerous and seductive young wife, and a gang of outlaw bikers who blame him for the death of one of its members. The real story, Gavin finally learns, is murder.
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