The Wrath of Grapes
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I’d never heard of a guy being skewered on a steel fence post before. There were a lot of things I’d never thought much about, though, before the Esterbrook case got underway. That first morning, when the phone started ringing in the kitchen, I tried to ignore it. It had been well after midnight when I’d arrived home from Idaho the night before, and the bedside clock read six-thirty when the first ring woke me. I started to get up. The ringing quit. My bedroom was upstairs in our two-story cabin by the lake, but the door was open, and Ernie had the ringer turned all the way up so he could hear the phone from the patio. I dropped my head back on the pillow. It rang again. I sat up, stretched, staggered across the room, donned my EverLast Boxing robe, and started barefooted down the knotty pine stairs. I was thinking about the recently concluded case. I had been thinking about it since leaving Spokane last evening. An Idaho mine operator in shaky financial condition, blew up a mineshaft to collect on the insured loss of a couple of boring machines. After the explosion, two maintenance people turned up missing, and about a week after that they were found, bloated and festering in the heat of the deep
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About the Book
The Wrath of Grapes
It’s a novel, like Steinbeck’s, that talks about the migrant farm workers who live there now, and defines their similarities and differences.
When veteran insurance investigator, Lanny O’Brian, undertakes to investigate the damage claim on a pair of vandalized high-tech grape harvesting machines, he finds himself engulfed in the politics of immigration.
He calls on the buxom adventuress, Polly Evenrude, for her expertise in the wine industry, and a puzzle develops that involves romance, kidnapping, and murder.
About the Author
Robert Bennett worked for a number of years as a logger in the big timbered forests of Southern Oregon. He now works for an environmental engineering firm, trying to save what’s left of the planet, and writes fiction with socio-economic overtones. Ms. Paulie Brading grew up in Zane Grey country, the Rogue River Valley of Southern Oregon. Both writers attended the same high school, a few years apart, in the 1960s.