The Bully of Order

Set in a logging town on the lawless Pacific coast of Washington State at the turn of the twentieth century, a spellbinding novel of fate and redemption--told with a muscular lyricism and filled with a cast of characters Shakespearean in scope--in which the lives of an ill-fated family are at the mercy of violent social and historical forces that tear them apart. Keen to make his fortune, Jacob Ellstrom, armed with his medical kit and new wife, Nell, lands in The Harbor--a mud-filled, raucous coastal town teeming with rough trade pioneers, sawmill laborers, sailors, and prostitutes.