Loggers Don’t Make Love

Loggers Don't Make Love is a tricky deftly written mystery with a narrator that could coax you into a barrel above Niagra falls. Author Dave Rowan paints a true picture of the rough and tumble life in a logging camp on the Olympic Peninsula. The mystery isn't over when the story ends. Reading the prologue reveals the cleverness the author had when penning this thriller.

-James Sweeney, author of A Thousand Prayers: Alaska Climbing Expedition, Marine Life Solidarity and The List

It's the waning days of old growth logging on the Olympic Peninsula, and Dave Rowan's Knucklehead is one of a group of raucous loggers. Knucklehead relates a fast-paced tale in a strong voice of friendship, love, death, and murder amongst the big trees. No one escapes unscathed, and in the end, Knucklehead concludes "perhaps just recognizing our karma during one lifetime will help us get rid of it in the next one."

-Doug Pope, Author of The Way to Gaamaak Cove

Partly inspired by the Louis L'Amour novels scattered through the bunkhouses, the novel Loggers Don't Make Love takes place in a logging camp on Washington State's, Olympic Peninsula. The tall tale explores the interplay of camaraderie, friendship, love and sex, and pays tribute to the itinerant workers who found honor in harvesting the last old-growth timber still legal to log. It was a blood sport, providing a stage for big egos, some of them twisted, far from the centers of good manners. Like commercial fishermen and miners, loggers found nobility in doing a job that other people didn't want to admit was necessary. Of course, the women they pursued could see through the bluster. Grisdale, the logging camp, was billed as the last real camp in the lower 48 until it closed and disappeared in 1985. The book's title may be read as words of advice.

Loggers Don't Make Love, a stunning debut novella by a former NW logger, Dave Rowan, defies a literary pigeon-hole. Glorious first-growth NW forests-wild and free and lovely-seep their wildness and more into the loggers who harvest them in the US '70s, and the women who love them. Throw in a murder mystery and you have a feast that is good-to-the-last-surprising-drop.

-Kerry Dean Feldman, author of Alice's Trading Post: A Novel of the West and Drunk on Love: Twelve Stories to Savor Responsibly