Breaking Blue - Softcover

Egan, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570614296 ISBN 13: 9781570614293

Publisher: Sasquatch Books, 2004

Synopsis

In 1935, the Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from the reluctant hobos (many of them displaced farmers who had fled the midwestern dust bowls), robbed dairies, and engaged in all manner of nefarious crimes, including murder. This history was suppressed until 1989, when former logger, Vietnam vet, and Spokane cop Tony Bamonte discovered a strange 1955 deathbed confession while researching a thesis on local law enforcement history. Bamonte began to probe what had every appearance of widespread police crime and a massive cover-up whose highlight was the unsolved murder of Town Marshall George Conff. The fact that many of those involved, now in their 80s and 90s, were still alive made it imperative that Bamonte unravel this mystery. The result is Breaking Blue, a white-knuckle ride through institutional corruption and cover-up that vividly documents Depression-era Spokane and an extraordinary case that few believed would ever be brought to light.

About this title

About the Author:

Timothy Egan is the Pacific Northwest correspondent for The New York Times and the author of The Good Rain, Lasso the Wind, and The Winemaker's Daughter. His first book, The Good Rain, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in 1991. For The Worst Hard Time, a 2006 book about people who lived through the Great Depression's Dust Bowl, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in History/Biography. Egan lives in Seattle.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Powerhouse story of an iconoclastic sheriff who cracked through 54 years of police coverups and solved the oldest open murder case in the country. Beginning with a brilliant evocation of 1935 Spokane and Pend Oreille County, Egan (Seattle bureau chief of The New York Times; The Good Rain, 1990) sets the scene for the killing of Spokane town marshal George Conniff, who had surprised men stealing butter from the local creamery. In the fifth year of the Depression, Spokane was full of reluctant hobos--many of them farmers who had fled the dust bowls of the Midwest--living, hungry for food and work, in a Hooverville by the local rail yards. The Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from these ``vagrants'' and collected also from the bootleggers, saloons, whorehouses, Chinese lotteries, and opium dens in the ``Queen City of the Richest Empire in the Western Hemisphere.'' When a shortage doubled the price of butter, 6'3'' rock-fisted Detective Clyde Ralstin and his partner profitably robbed dairies until the night that Conniff was killed. Ralstin was fingered for the killing by fellow detective Charles Sonnabend, but Sonnabend was ordered by the brass to stop investigating, and Ralstin disappeared. Fifty-four years later, in 1989, 47-year-old Sheriff Anthony Bamonte--former logger, Vietnam vet, Spokane cop--was writing his master's thesis on the ten previous sheriffs of Pend Oreille County and discovered a 1955 deathbed statement by Sonnabend about the coverup. Bamonte began to probe the case and, amazingly, men and women in their 80s and 90s who had known Ralstin came forward. Egan's narration of Bamonte's methodical stalking, of the ring of paranoia tightening around Ralstin (living in a tiny Montana town and knowing of the hunt), and of murder refusing to stay buried after 54 years--all make for compulsive, white-knuckle reading. Egan rises into the Most Wanted group of true-crime writers with this smoothly told, exciting account. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sasquatch Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1570614296
• ISBN 13: 9781570614293
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256