Rattlesnake Ridge

It was 1989. Real estate mania was sweeping through the untamed woods of rural New Hampshire. Forrest Garnett, the largest landowner in the picture perfect town of Shaftsbury wanted no part of it. But he was pressed from all sides by men – including his own son – who saw dollar signs in every blade of grass.

Now, one man had been murdered, and the air quivered with intrigue. Garnett wrote his daughter, Lily: "Beware, beware: there is blood in the water and the sharks are circling…"

But despite that dire warning, this Phil Simmons novel is not just about murder, and it is blissfully lacking in violence and gore.

It is, in fact, more a love story than a murder mystery, more a tale of land development and local pride than pure greed. It is a story that rings as true today as in 1989. And to the delight of readers, it’s sprinkled with comic patches and lyrical descriptions of the rugged mountains and tangled forests of central New Hampshire. Phil Simmons just couldn’t put aside his irrepressible sense of humor and his love of the land.

It is a first novel, and there will be no second. Phil Simmons died July 27, 2002, of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

That’s where David Reich came in. He polished the text with great skill and good humor. Reich, a former editor at the World, the national magazine of the Unitarian Universalist religious denomination, had been editing Simmons’s work since the middle 1990s. In fact, many of the essays from Learning to Fall were published in the World first, and when it came time to put the collection together, Reich edited that, too.