Going up Cripple Creek

In the summer of 1973, while the nation sits glued to the Watergate hearings on television, game warden Royce Tackett polices the backwoods of fictional Sumac County. When a flood of suburban city dwellers arrives in canoes following a hit Hollywood film, local entrepreneur Buck Varner attempts to turn the river into a tourist attraction, complete with a hired banjo player picking "Cripple Creek" at dusk for atmosphere.

The fun sours when tourists and officials begin turning up dead in impossible locations: a dentist found sitting dry on a springhouse step, an ATF agent perched sixty feet up a tulip poplar tree, a young banjo player submerged in eleven inches of water, and a state dam surveyor lined up on a dry hillside. Every victim is bone-dry on the outside, yet every coroner's ruling comes back the same: drowning in icy, upper-creek spring water.

Lurking above the bodies is an eerie, phantom banjo tune playing a distinct third-string technique-a song once played by Royce's father, a Prohibition revenue agent who walked up Cripple Creek in 1932 and never returned. To stop the body count and protect the hollow from a destructive dam project, Royce must hike up Hogback Mountain to confront the mountain's secrets and face the ghost lingering in Aunt Vashti's springhouse guest book.