The Last Sanctuary A Novel [Paperback]

At once a heart-pounding , chillingly realistic thriller and a dark plunge into the human psyche,The Last Sanctuaryis the tale of an innocent man accused of murder.

When a killing is falsely blamed on Joe Curtis, a Gulf War veteran living on the edge of society, he hides in a dark underworld of armed militias and terrorist cults, running from the cops, federal agents, and from his own tortured soul. In a cat-and-mouse chase across soaring mountains and vast glaciers of Alaska, the complex relationship between the fugitive and his nemesis, a female Native American ATF agent, is rendered unpredictably and superbly.Craig Holdenwas born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Montana with an MFA, and is the author ofThe River Sorrowand The Jazz Bird. He lives in New Mexico.In his gut Joe Curtis knew when he first heard the sounds.  A certain arrhythmic thrum deep in his Pontiac's engine, a nauseating whack of hot metal on metal, that he had a big problem.  He knew cars well, and so he knew this. But for the same reason, and others (he was both optimistic and, in some measure, desperate), he let himself believe it was a thing he could fix if he needed, that in any case he could nurse the thirteen-year-old J2000--an '82 showing 125,000 miles--to the west coast, his destination, and deal with the problem there.  And as if his faith were enough, the thrumming stopped then, after a minute or two.

He was on I-94 a hundred miles west of Fargo, North Dakota, halfway between there and Bismarck.  He had three hundred dollars in his pocket, and was hoping the car, a beater he'd bought for four hundred and fifty dollars and refurbished economically but very nicely, including even new paint, could be sold on the coast for maybe fifteen hundred, at least a thousand--more than enough to fly himself and his brother, Terry, back home to Detroit.  Even if he couldlãN