Fire in the Hole!

Fourteen-year-old Mick doesn’t want to end up like his father, a roughneck union miner working for low wages in the Coeur d’Alene silver-mining district of Idaho. He detests the vigilante attitude of his father’s union and would rather do his fighting with words like his mentor, Mr. Delaney, who runs the town newspaper. But when the radicals of his father’s union blow up the mining company’s ore-concentrating mill, Mick’s dreams blow up with it. Federal soldiers put the town under martial law and arrest every man in it, including Mick and his father. Mick realizes that he’s his family’s only chance for survival. He must escape and do the one thing he swore he’d never do?join the scabs working in the mines. First-time author Mary Cronk Farrell has crafted a gripping historical novel based on a true event that occurred at the turn of the last century. Lessons from this overlooked part of U.S. history will still resonate with readers today. Author’s note.

Mary Cronk Farrell is a free-lance journalist living in Spokane, Washington. This is her first novel.