Hugh Mahoney

Tamarack Hugh Mahoney

Tamarack is the story of a hunted woman forced to choose between security for herself and infant daughter and an equally compelling need to realize her social and political convictions. Paula, artist, mother and one-time political activist, surfaces in an isolated Midwestern region of high hills and narrow valleys known as the Tamarack. Falsely accused of killing a cop, she settles with Shasta, her infant daughter, on a long abandoned hill farm. Run no more, she says as she watches Shasta sleep. No one will find us here. For help in restoring her derelict farm she turns to her neighbor, Evan Zehr. Paula puts Evan immediately on guard. Why has she come? Why here? Loneliness and desire persuade him to admit he doesn't want to know more. On her part, Paula tells herself to accept Evan's shy advances. Mrs. Zehr: What better cover than the anonymous wife of a discreet Tamarack tree farmer? Paula sends a letter to big city friends advertising the Tamarack as an unspoiled paradise. Someone gets sloppy, word leaks out, waves of settlers arrive, and the resulting artists' colony puts Tamarack on the map of those determined to track her down. The novel's integrated subplot exposes the aggressive means employed by members of altruistic Tamarack Colony, self-proclaimed, to acquire land. Luna, a manipulative herbalist, uses her husband Frank to draw Bryan into a ménage à trois. Frank freaks out, Luna turns to Bryan, and Frank plots revenge. Deepening Paula's character as artist and searcher, we follow her quest for the origins of art as she studies ancient artifacts found on Tamarack's eroding hillsides. Using reverse chronology, Paula tracks art to its source: human figure to abstract form to sculpted tool-art is born. Pursued by bounty hunters, Paula is shadowed as well by Butch, a young man with a history of molesting girls. On a cold winter's night Butch enters Paula's house and catches Paula naked in her bed. She flees to her car, but Butch has got there