Author: baronrbirtcher

FISTFUL OF RAIN is the sequel to 2017’s South California Purples. Set in 1975, it is the story of a nation, a rural county, and a small town coming to terms with turbulent change. The theft of a rancher’s livestock ends in an assault that escalates into arson, and the murders of nearly a dozen people. Residents of a “hippie” commune are accused of having committed the acts that have led the small … small county to the brink of a range war, and of feeding the tensions between generations. Sheriff Ty Dawson, a cattle rancher himself, finds himself at…

The year is 1973, and the last of America’s soldiers are returning home from Vietnam, often shouted down and spat upon by protesters, while the first toxic cracks of public mistrust have begun to appear at the highest levels of government. The American Indian Movement has entered into a bloody occupation of Wounded Knee, gas shortages have pushed the economy into deep recession, and violent civil … civil unrest is captured in living color and televised nightly on the evening news. But rural Meriwether County, tucked away amid the sweeping river valleys and serrated mountain ridges of southern Oregon has…