Henry Matthaus has spent his entire life looking for a reason to stay somewhere. After decades of living in the world's great cities, and further ruining his life in each one, including the latest, Seattle, he drives through the night in the Pacific Northwest. The drive brings him over a ridge at sunrise and into the town of Broke Rock, Washington. Population 256. Nestled in a sleepy crescent-shaped cove. It's the most beautiful place he's ever seen.He rents a cabin on the hill and adopts a dog named Dip, a limping, two-toned, perpetually smiling border collie, and together they settle into the kind of peaceful life Henry has never managed before. He fishes off the pier and hunts up in the mountain. He watches the fog roll in from the ocean and feels the forest wake up around him as spring comes on. For the first time in forty-some years, his restlessness goes quiet.But Broke Rock has a dark history. It burned to the ground in 1933, towards the end of Prohibition, killing nearly everyone in the town in a single night. The town priest is convinced the Devil himself started that fire and that he's still somewhere in the surrounding woods, waiting.The man who owns most of the town carries a smile that's slightly too wide; above the town road, half-hidden in an outcropping of rock, there's a cave where the air runs cold, and Dip refuses to go near, no matter what; and that's only the beginning as Broke Rock's dark past seems to seep into the present and Henry's mind begins to unravel.Broke Rock is an atmospheric literary novel about a fractured man who finds peace in an improbable place, and what it costs him to lose it. Told with dark humor, sharp wit, and through the raw, unguarded voice of someone who's seen too much of the world and finally found the one corner of it worth keeping. Or so he thinks.
