Crime novel brings FBI to Sandpoint

Northwestern writer Dick Sonnichsen’s newest book is Tumbleweed: Angela’s Sometimes Messy and Complex Odyssey

To Find Her Voice. His character Nicky White is in Sandpoint, Idaho, for the summer, a recent college grad taking a gap year to

soak up some lake time and meet new friends at the White Pine Pub. But Nicky has a secret or two. Her real name is Angela Wilson and she’s an FBI Special Agent working undercover to figure out if somebody really wants to blow up a coal train on the famous Pend Oreille Lake railroad trestle, or if it’s just a bunch of hot air coming from a local hot-head environmentalist.

Angela’s other secret is that she’s trying to figure out just who the heck she really is. A short and disastrous marriage sent her

directly into an existential whirlpool. As she confesses to a new friend, she feels like a tumbleweed, blowing every which

way on the winds of her own emotions. Things get messy when her ultraabusive ex decides to take revenge on her for leaving

abruptly and permanently on their first wedding anniversary, the only decision she is sure of up to that point.

As undercover agent Nicky, she learns much about herself while dealing with the murder of a good friend, a near-deadly

assault on herself, an investigation that seems to point to one disgruntled bookstore owner as a possible eco-terrorist, and her

growing awareness that her sexual orientation is not what she always thought it was.

With the help of retired Special Agent, Frank Mc- Bride, a couple of young loggers, her good friend Special Agent Nora Sims

(Is it friendship or something more?), and Clyde Spooner, the bookstore owner himself, Angela figures out the answers to her

questions about coal train bombings and her own transformative, tumbleweed journey. Tumbleweed is Sonnichsen’s

second crime fiction book set in Sandpoint. This and his six books of social commentary are available at select bookstores and at

amazon.com. For more information, contact Blue Creek Press at [email protected].