I’ve always been intrigued by the history of the river that runs through my home town of Charleston, West Virginia. The Kanawha River is slightly less than 100 miles long, from the headwaters where the New and Gauley rivers meet to where it spills into the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, but an amazing amount has happened along that 100 miles. There have been Adena and Native American settlements, forts and battles, discoveries of salt, timber, coal, oil and natural gas, boom towns and busts.
From the time I wrote my first novel in 2005, I started dreaming about a collaborative fiction project where a group of writers would join together to write a series of stories all set in the same location. I read Thieves World in my formative years and thought that was the coolest thing ever. When I returned home to Charleston after living away for nearly 15 years, everything fell together and River Town was born.
“Hayden Lowe may or may not have killed a man out west, and no one seems to know for sure why he’s back in River Town; his friend, Lillian Conley, is keeping secrets of her own in her journal. Will Captain JD Dawson lose his beloved sternwheeler, the Miss Jayne Marie, in a winner-takes-all bet? Julia Hubbard has a secret project; Andrew Wilson is plotting on the dusty streets of River Town, and what about that strange Dame Roxalana? There is more to her than anyone is willing to say. The men in the coal mines around River Town are showing strange symptoms no one can explain, yet everyone is whispering about them.