Sour Rain - Tapa blanda

On the first day of sunshine in the summer of '67, a body bobbed to the surface of Auke Bay. Where the man came from, how he got to southeastern Alaska, and his true business there was never determined. Even his full name remained unknown. The seagulls did not care. They abandoned their usual search for garbage in the wake of a passing ship and stayed with the body, loudly screeching their delight at the man's resurrection from the depths. This signaled the beginning of a ten-day war between law enforcement and an incipient criminal group with powerful, invisible ties. Coincidental with the gruesome discovery north of Juneau, a new prosecutor named Brian Thomas arrived on the afternoon flight from Seattle. Coincidental? Many crime investigators do not believe in it. During the following days, the war bloodied the streets and hills of the city. Men died as far away as Skagway and Haines. The schedules of the autopsy doctors were overloaded. The walk-in cooler at the Burns Family Mortuary was filled, yet there was little time for funerals. After that first sunny day, it all happened under heavy gray cloudiness and through curtains of nightly rains. Coincidentally, the strange, new lawyer always was in the middle of it all.

Contrary to the advice of his father, Thomas J. Aron became a lawyer and spent the next twenty-seven years proving that old Dad was right. A major accomplishment of his legal career was his collection of unusual experiences that have become the basis of much of his writing. He left the legal profession in 1994 to pursue fulltime his love of writing. Aron began writing for newspapers at age ten and continued this interest as an avocation until his mid-50s. He was the primary contributor to a 1989 news series about Denver's controversial Two Forks Dam. It was awarded Best Series by the Colorado Press Association. For nine years he wrote Headgate, a monthly magazine column about water resources for agriculture. His environmental news reporting was highlighted by a 1995 story about pollution to a naturally pure underground water supply from a municipal sewage plan. His first novel, The Dam, was used in manuscript form by a citizen-activist group to help expose the dangerous deterioration of a major dam in the West. A tribute to a childhood mentor was published in 1997 as The Legend of Ernie The Bear. His short stories have been published, beginning with Xanadu, the literary journal of Doane College. Aron lives in the greater-Denver area and has three grown sons. He is working on a new story of murder and intrigue called Warning: Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, to be released soon. He may be contacted by email at: aronbooks@myway.com