There’s been a murder in Furnass—or has there? The death under suspicious circumstances of prominent real estate developer Dickie Sutcliff leads the Reverend Bryce Orr to play detective. Ignoring contradictory evidence as well as prime suspects such as Dickie’s wife or brother, Bryce’s favorite suspect is his childhood friend, Julian Lyle. Meanwhile Lyle, a less than successful lawyer in town whose aspirations included the failed Furnass Towers project, is most concerned with stopping his new best friend Kim Leong from using his martial arts skills to kill a local drug dealer who may have something to do with the disappearance of Kim’s teenage daughter. The threads of these various investigations reach a violent conclusion amid missed connections and misplaced loyalties, as well as the possibilities for forgiveness.

All Fall Down (Books of Furnass)

Literature & Fiction

Snodgrass, Richard Bruce

Literary

Calling Crow Press

There's been a murder in Furnass--or has there? The death under suspicious circumstances of prominent real estate developer Dickie Sutcliff leads the Reverend Bryce Orr to play detective. Ignoring contradictory evidence as well as prime suspects such as Dickie's wife or brother, Bryce's favorite suspect is his childhood friend, Julian Lyle. Meanwhile Lyle, a less than successful lawyer in town whose aspirations included the failed Furnass Towers project, is most concerned with stopping his new best friend Kim Leong from using his martial arts skills to kill a local drug dealer who may have something to do with the disappearance of Kim's teenage daughter. The threads of these various investigations reach a violent conclusion amid missed connections and misplaced loyalties, as well as the possibilities for forgiveness.

All Fall Down

In the summer of 1863, Judson Walker, a captain of Morgan's Raiders, and Jonathan Reid, a young engineer, come to Furnass to appropriate two of Colin Lyle's steam-powered road engines. The purpose is to outfit the engines with iron plate and the newly developed Gatlin Guns, and, with Morgan, deliver the war engines to General Lee's army in Central Pennsylvania. Amid Walker's growing involvement with Lyle's wife Libby, deserting soldiers, and Reid's own agenda, Walker learns Morgan isn't coming. The novel reaches its climax with Lyle trying to sabotage the war engines. Walker must decide between Libby and duty toward his men, the war and individual human values.
The Books of Furnass tell the story of a fictitious mill town, ten miles from Pittsburgh in southwestern Pennsylvania. At the heart of the series is the Furnass Towers Trilogy, about the efforts of men and women to maintain their lives, and the life of the town, in the face of the mill closings. In addition to contemporary life, the series chronicles the town when it was just an outpost after the French and Indian War...the town as it grew around an iron furnace in the wilderness...as it became an industrial center from the time of the American Civil War to the Vietnam War. And the series tells the story of the Lyle family, who were involved with the town from its founding to its struggles to survive after the mills went away.

Across the River (The Books of Furnass)

The stories of Holding On show life in Furnass during the prosperous late 1970s and early 1980s, though there are rumors of mill closings and layoffs. Interwoven is a tale of two Scottish soldiers two hundred years earlier in the same area, struggling through the virgin forest looking for lost sheep.

Holding On: Stories of Furnass (Books of Furnass)

A boy encounters unfamiliar areas in his hometown; witnesses older boys in a sexual encounter; gets caught up in a neighborhood gang crabapple fight--and discovers how attractive and exciting these dangers can be. A trio of young mill workers watches one of their high school friends play in a Super Bowl game and have to confront the comparisons with what they've made of their own lives. The young abused wife of a policeman finds herself the keeper of her paraplegic husband after a car accident and learns that love can take many forms. An old woman rattles through the rooms of her big house late at night and confronts a young intruder in her kitchen. A husband, while knitting a fabric of lies to make time to see his girlfriend, realizes he loves his wife but that the heart has reasons that even the heart doesn't understand.
In the thirteen stories of Holding On we see life in Furnass during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of prosperity for a Western Pennsylvania mill town, though there are intimations of change, rumors of mill closings, layoffs. Two hundred years earlier in this same area, two Scottish soldiers of the Black Watch, part of Colonel Bouquet's expedition into the uncharted Ohio Territory to retrieve Indian captives, struggle through the virgin forest along the Allehela River looking for lost sheep.
The story of the two Scottish soldiers--their struggle with the limitless unforgiving foreign landscape; conflicting clan loyalties; and the continual threat of attack from Indians--interweaves among the stories of later-day Furnass, creating a collective portrait of people, then and now, as life changes about them, doing their best to hold on.

Holding On: Stories of Furnass (The Books of Furnass)

In the working class dialect of Western Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh, the phrase redd up means to put in order, to tidy or make neat, such as after dinner we helped redd up the table. In the stories of Redding Up, the final volume of the critically acclaimed Books of Furnass, we see characters from other books of the series about the fictitious mill town of Furnass seeking closure or meaning from earlier events as they continue to live their lives. A successful businesswoman returns to her hometown to tie up some loose ends, dealing with a recalcitrant uncle and the living arrangements of her father's mistress. A Black homicide detective comes to Furnass to learn something of the life of a man he killed twenty-three years earlier. A grandmother makes contact with a retired minister wanting him to admit his presence at an outrage that happened to her when they were growing up. The daughter of one of the town's founding families returns to clean out the family home and finds more than she expected in the cluttered basement. A local hero finds himself fleeing his past even as he pursues it through his daily rounds, watched over by the glowing red eye of a great winged dragon. Or not. In counterpoint to these stories of a mill town struggling to survive without a mill, there are portfolios of photographs taken by the author of the region in the mid-seventies when there was steel with the mills and valley towns flourishing. The book concludes with a Coda, which could serve as a Coda for the entire Books of Furnass series, an origin story of the time before there was a town here when a chief of the fictional Onagona Indians has to choose between expediency and survival when confronted with the spiritual.

Redding Up: More Stories of Furnass (Books of Furnass)

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