Lambs of Spring (ADA Reed)

Sheriff Ada Reed dredges up a car that has lain at the bottom of a reservoir for sixteen years. Inside she finds the remains of two young people, brutally murdered. High school classmates of hers, the boy is remembered as a bully and a thief, while the girl was his little shiksa, his cheap tart from a poor Christian family.

Ada and her friends try to unravel the final days of the 'Bonnie and Clyde' couple and identify their long-ago killer while reminded of half-buried regrets of their own. Ada's own life begins to unravel when she receives divorce papers from her husband, then a sudden reminder of past intimacy with Ben McGann.

But there was more to the young victims than popular accounts portray, and more than bones were dredged up with the car. Findings of local corruption, prejudice, and betrayal touch nearly everyone in town, bringing some to shame, some to tears, and someone, it seems, to murder.

Roger Howell was raised in a loosely bound working class and often not-much-working-to-be-had class family in numerous towns in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Stories around campfires and wood stoves told of brawling uncles, lost gold mines, and friends and family who had gone away-to war, to jail, or to start somewhere better. All of it seemed to have happened before Roger happened along, and for that reason he's always been fascinated with those romantic years of the forties and fifties. Now, even after four universities and an international career as a geologist and environmental engineer, Howell's stories always come back to the Northwest, and to that misty time of innocence, prejudice, and paranoia. He started writing fiction about fifteen years ago. His novels are fixed in the mid-century, and his protagonists are all strong women of the west because they are who raised him and sustained him, and who continue to inspire him. Roger lives in Colorado now with his wife and their pure-bred Texas-truckstop dog, Junebug.