G. A. Smith is a full-time college professor who has come to fiction writing somewhat late in life. His first two novels, "A Cast Away" and "One Horse Town" relate the story of a man who has just survived a mass shooting at his school, and in his grief and depression he moves to a small town in Montana as a way of trying to escape trauma. There, however, he discovers that doing so isn't as easy as he'd hoped. Dr. Smith resides in a small town in Oregon with his wife and three dogs, and spends as much time as he can fly fishing.