LONG TRAIN HOME
Now Available!
Ryan Spencer won’t get on a plane…and a major league ball player who won’t get on a plane better hit .400, knock in 150 runs and never chase the high cheese. So, it’s fortunate that Ryan is a five-tool player. He can take one low and outside and turn it into two. He can jack a mistake, back-row bleachers and cherry-pop quick. He can smother the short hop like an unwanted puppy and throw strikes from shallow leftfield. But he won’t fly.
So, like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Ted Williams before him, Ryan rides the rails from town to town. But as he travels across the continent he also travels back in time. The first time Ryan wakes on the train, he’s in 1939, sitting beside 13-year-old Georgie Abbott who has snuck aboard and is looking for the man who murdered his sister. Ten days later, Ryan wakes between Denver and Kansas City, it’s 1941, Georgie’s two years older, more determined and looking for help. More help than Ryan can give.
Two weeks later, when Ryan falls asleep on the train from Montreal to New York City, the Expos are struggling, Ryan can’t lay off the outside slider, and his teammates hate him. When he wakes up, Hiroshima is still smoldering, Richard Nixon is running for Congress, seven more girls have been murdered and Georgie Abbott won’t take no for an answer. Georgie and Ryan spend 70 years and the rest of that summer tracking down the men who killed Georgie’s sister and a dozen other young women. And in between Ryan and the Montreal Expos scramble after a wild-card spot and a shot at the big prize.
Long Train Home, a literary thriller, complete at 100,000 words owes something to W.P. Kinsella and a little to The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle. It’s about baseball, time’s thin veil, and the weight of accumulated regret but it’s a new story and a new voice.
PRAISE
"Murder, time travel, and baseball--this unusual combination makes an intriguing read."
- JACK DAVID, EDITOR, ECW PRESS
"Murder, time travel, and baseball--this unusual combination makes an intriguing read."
- JACK DAVID, EDITOR, ECW PRESS
Jeff Houlahan
ABOUT JEFF
I was born in Calgary, Alberta and grew up on a half-dozen military bases in Canada and Germany before settling in Ottawa, Canada. I've been a waiter, a security guard (there is nothing less hip than being a nineteen-year-old security guard in full uniform at a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), a bartender, made pool liners (a much tougher job than it sounds), delivered mail on Parliament Hill and played guitar in a punk band called The Rainkings.
Today I am an ecologist, conservation biologist and writer. I live with my wife Kim in Saint John, New Brunswick and work at the University of New Brunswick. All along I've been writing – short stories, songs, and, over the last dozen years, novels. Read more >>
I was born in Calgary, Alberta and grew up on a half-dozen military bases in Canada and Germany before settling in Ottawa, Canada. I've been a waiter, a security guard (there is nothing less hip than being a nineteen-year-old security guard in full uniform at a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), a bartender, made pool liners (a much tougher job than it sounds), delivered mail on Parliament Hill and played guitar in a punk band called The Rainkings.
Today I am an ecologist, conservation biologist and writer. I live with my wife Kim in Saint John, New Brunswick and work at the University of New Brunswick. All along I've been writing – short stories, songs, and, over the last dozen years, novels. Read more >>
From the blog...From the TOP 10 CRIME FICTION WRITERS SERIES...
#8 - Dennis Lehane 
Dennis Lehane has written one huge thing, one enormous life-shadowing thing, one thing that he will have to live with for the rest of his life.
What does it mean to wake up every morning and know you have done your absolute best thing. That there is no chance, zero, nada, bupkis that you will ever write anything close to as good in the entire rest of your life. Do you want to stop? Or do you just pretend that it’s not true? That maybe you will write something just as good. Read more >> |
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