Lute Bapcat Books

Woods Cop mystery author Joseph Heywood takes readers to an era when people had to be as hard as the lives they lived. Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan’s first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state’s industrial center. Featuring a stunning array of characters, fascinating historical detail, and Heywood’s trademark writing about life and work in Michigan’s wild, Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation—all apparently designed by mine owners to deny nature’s bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union. The strike’s violence culminates in the Italian Hall disaster, during which a man allegedly yells fire in a small building with several hundred people inside. In the panic, 73 people are crushed or die of suffocation, the majority of them the children and wives of striking miners at the hall for a Christmas party. Even with good people dying, the Michigan governor refuses to take sides. Should Lute Bapcat?

Title: Mountains of the Misbegotten( A Lute Bapcat Mystery) Binding: Hardcover Author: JosephHeywood Publisher: LyonsPress

We last saw our hero in Mountains of the Misbegotten and Heywood delivers an even more thrilling mystery. Lute Bapcat and Pinkhus Zakov had been partners in the far northern counties of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for years when in early 1917, Zakov suddenly disappeared. A year later, Bapcat and Jordy (now 18) get a summons to Marquette, by former President Teddy Roosevelt. (Bapcat had served as a Roughrider with Roosevelt back in the day.) Roosevelt tells them that Zakov was sent to Russia by the U.S. government to find Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who abdicated and disappeared. Zakov went into Russia in April 1917 and had been feared dead, until an urgent message comes through a Swedish diplomat: Zakov wants Bapcat and Jordy sent to Russia to assist him. In the midst of the flu epidemic, a strange, Russian-born American marine major named Dodge is assigned to lead them into and across Russia until they locate Zakov. They dive deep into the heart of the Russian Fatherland as the Revolution of 1917 turns into a full out Civil War, with a level of chaos, random violence, and blood-letting far beyond Bapcat’s imagination.