To Kill a Common Loon

by Mitch Luckett

Overview

"I had to become a bird in order to become a man," Grandfather Two Loons told the boy. The boy grew up into a latter-day minstrel, wandering the highways with his dog, Medusa. He's lost his way. He's lost his knack for carrying a tune. He's thrust into the Olympic Mountain wilderness without a clue how to survive. He's got a dragon on his tail, a cougar at his throat and a murder on his hands. His one saving grace is he's got avian pluck in his heart. With spiritual guidance, he might be able to solve the murder, get back his beat, and find a place to call home.

"LOON reads like a cross between Carl Hiaason and Edward Abbey. Mitch Luckett has invented crazy but convincing characters, both human and animal, in a magically, realistic whodunit. I loved it, especially for its subtle message that without a connection with the natural world, humans are destined to wander about the earth with no real spiritual grounding. I've always wanted to come back as a raven. Now, I'm not so sure."
--Mick Houck, writer, and Audubon Society of Portland's Urban Naturalist and Executive Director at Urban Greenspaces Institute, Oregon.

"LOON asks, what if you accidentally shape-changed into your spirit animal and it was not a noble predator but a low-on-the-food-chain prey? Add a human whodunit to the mix and you get an off-beat, juicy stew. LOON is that rarest of literary birds: a funny book with a vital message."
--M. K. Wren, author of the "Conan Flagg" mystery series and novel, A Gift Upon the Shore.

"I loved Mitch's book. Has large-market
potential, I'd say. A good yarn, wonderfully visceral, funny, and natural history driven."
--Robert Michael Pyle, recipient of: John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, Wintergreen and National Outdoor Book Award, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place.

"Mitch Luckett writes with rare humanity and a quirky, disheveled grace. This is a marvelous, quixotic, funny book. There is no hero's story I would rather read."
--Geri Doran, recipient of Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award for Resin.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940032972976
Publisher:	IFDPublishing
Publication date:	12/18/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	598 KB

About the Author

Mitch Luckett grew up on a red-clay and limestone-rock farm in Missouri where he developed a lifelong affinity for animals, both domestic and wild. He discovered, after getting off his school bus one day, a dazed common loon that had missed the muddy Mississippi and crashed on a water-slickened asphalt road. He took the hungry bird home, nursed it back to health, and released it on the big river. His sisters, until now, have had no idea what happened to their gold fish. That encounter became the inspiration for this contemporary fantasy/rural Northwest mystery, To Kill a Common Loon. Two more novels in the series have yet to take wing: The Man in the Loon, and "The Cow That Jumped over the Loon.
Mitch served in the Navy then returned home to earn a BA in English Literature at Truman University. He was Nature Sanctuaries Director for the Portland Audubon Society in Oregon for 17 years, and he honed his skills as a storyteller by writing a monthly column for their newsletter, The Warbler. He now lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Brinnon, Washington, where he writes, picks banjo, sings to the birds, and tells tall tales to his Westie, Mim.