2.5 stars. This is yet another novel that I enjoyed, but needed an editor. It doesn’t earn its 464 pages, and could have easily lost 100 pages of repetitive character details that didn’t add much. However, the prose is crisp, the characters are empathetic and believable, and the author does a great job of conveying the experience of living in a Pacific Northwest logging town in the 70s. It’s tough to get anyone to empathize with a would-be villain who has a lust to destroy an old-growth redwood that’s thousands of years old and keeps his dog tied outdoors on a chain, but somehow the author does it. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this because of the unnecessary length, and I felt like the story had a lot of interesting subplots that I wish the author would have followed in a more satisfying way, but I look forward to seeing what this author writes next.