Furnass

This is the story of the well-intentioned, but ill-conceived attempt to construct a high-rise building in the middle of a stricken mill town. It is the story of a head-strong superintendent, who pours concrete when he's told not to... of a rebar foreman whose insecurities make him dangerous to everyone around him... the story of an architect who hides the project's true cost so he can build a monument to himself... a young inspector totally out of his depth... a local developer content to wait and pick up the pieces when the dust settles... and it is the story of a young woman across the alley, who dances each morning in her window as she takes her shower, who distracts one worker to the point of a fatal accident and provides sanctuary for another.

The return of Harry Todd Sutcliff after 20 years to the Western Pennsylvania mill town of Furnass rekindles the competition with his younger brother Dickie who took over the family's prosperous real estate firm. Dickie Sutcliff finds himself dealing with a possible take-over of the business by his brother, as well as the problems of developing the former site of Buchanan Steel into an industrial park, the feeble financial maneuvering of an old friend, and setting up housekeeping with a younger woman. Both brothers are dealing with the ghost of a beloved sister, and with their aged mother, Kitty, a local eccentric and keeper of the family's secrets. Secrets that can heal or destroy.

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.

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 Lyles' 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.

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.

Paul Slater, whether he know it or not, lives by the book. Once a Green Beret sniper in Southeast Asia, he has done his best to fit into everyday life back home. He married his childhood sweetheart, lives in the house in Furnass, where he grew up, works as a pattern maker at his hometown steel mill. But, reports of the collapse of the Vietnam War triggers his feelings of futility and drives him to look for he doesn't know what in nearby Pittsburgh. There, in the city's Golden Triangle, coincidence-or maybe it's Fate. Or, Blind Chance-take over. Paul's path crosses that of a local hippie panhandler who acts as a spirit guide to the big city; he becomes infatuated with a pretty, blond intern with a movie company filming in town; and he unwittingly becomes a suspect in a number of recent murders. As Paul's story interweaves with those, he meets, including a movie director struggling to make a comeback, a young actor attempting to break into movies who carries a gun; and a black police detective seeking clues for his investigations and his life- the story reaches its violent conclusion when perception takes the place of reality.