Zoë Vanderlip is missing. The Ark is empty. And nobody on McGee Ridge can agree about what exactly happened to her.
McGee Ridge, earthquake-rattled and clinging to the thousand-foot cliffs of the Northern California coast, is nestled in one of a very few truly wild places left in the Lower 48. It is also home to a band of off-grid outlaws who vanished behind the famed Redwood Curtain in the 1960s and whose time there is swiftly coming to an end.
Will Specter, a burned-out journalist for the Los Angeles Times, arrived here to build a wilderness cabin for himself in the ’90s, after spending a decade as a war correspondent. In a community that subsists mainly off illegal cannabis farming, Will is an outlier. So too is Zoë Vanderlip, the revered matriarch of the original 60s settlers, whose adult son Klaus is one of the largest growers in the region. Unlike nearly everyone else, neither Will nor Zoë has ever grown marijuana, but when Zoë suddenly goes missing from her home―a large hand-built structure known as the Ark―the industry’s competing forces can no longer be ignored.
Pairing up with Daniel Likowski, a principled but mysterious grower whose business has been crushed by legalization, Will finds himself swept into a world of lost idealism and desperate loners, mobsters and corporate shell companies, violence and hypocrisy, all operating beneath the canopy of an ancient forest teetering at the very edge of the continent.
Spurned on both by his journalistic zeal and a strange love for the place and its people, Will begins his investigation as a journey to understand not just what happened to Zoë but to all of them.
In this atmospheric rural noir, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge’s debut novel plunges readers into a country that has existed for decades beyond the bounds of America-at-large but nevertheless reflects the essential conflicts of our divided culture.
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“A mystery of disappearances and land issues and unmoored hippies and so much more, Dale Maharidge applies his considerable prose gifts to fiction and builds a world both unnerving and inviting. A sharply smart and page-turner of a read.”
— Aimee Bender, New York Times bestselling author
“A rangy, topical thriller that charts the conflicts that erupt when a region dependent on mom-and-pop pot growers confronts the new world of legal marijuana and big-bucks, large-scale producers.”
— San Francisco Chronicle“Burn Coast is…a novel that appears to be about a missing person case but instead becomes an excavation of missing people: the outcasts and the misfits who have reached the end of the road.”
— Alta Journal“An off-the-grid mystery, and like all the best mysteries, it continues to unravel and bloom with each conversation, each clue, until the very last, smoke-filled paragraph.”
— High Times MagazineBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Dale Maharidge is the author of ten books, one of which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. His first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs. His second book, And Their Children After Them, won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and has written for Rolling Stone, George magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Times, among others. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has had artistic residencies at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He is a tenured professor at the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.