The Highland Topper

About the Book

In the summer of 1929, Carl and Helen Bradley bring their teenage children, Logan and Penny, to vacation at the Hotel Monterey in Highland County, Virginia. Despite the beauty of meandering streams and wandering flocks of sheep, the two young people fear there will be little of the excitement they have known in visits to the Atlantic beaches. They see no warning of the mystery-shrouded questions they will encounter or the danger they will face in the search that Jefferson “Topper” Fuller warns them not to begin.

For Penny and Logan, their parents, and Topper, honesty in the presence of danger to loved ones raises memories and distant losses they are reluctant to revisit. Can they accept the meaning of the past and act to change the present? Can they meet the challenges of the future, even aided by the warmth of new and rekindled love?

About the Author

The author and his wife, Carol, live in retirement in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, an hour's drive east of Monterey and Highland County, the site of this, his seventh book and fifth novel. As in his other stories set against the history of the region, his studies of source material and the countryside have taken him often on trips of document research, dining, conversation, photography, and observation of the land and its people, plants, and animals. Among the settings in his writings that he and his wife have visited, he lists the Highland Valley and the Pasture Valleys to the east as his favorite.