Bøker av Matt Ritter

MONTAIGNE MEDAL AWARD FINALISTIn his intriguing and unexpected second novel, Biology Professor Matt Ritter delivers a strange and startling generational tale of hardship and triumph in the American West. Natural science blends with history, and an unforeseen chain of causation emerges. In current day Los Angeles, UCLA Professor Marcus Melter is called to the scene of a gruesome murder by his friend, Detective Jack Bratton. While the case leads them into a mysterious world of crime and conspiracy, we learn about the bizarre history of these two men's connected families. Ritter uses his keen natural history observations and unerring sense of place to spin a haunting narrative of intertwined families moving between continents and across the American West, each ultimately affecting the other's path. Marcus and Jack become the axis around which Ritter spins an interconnected story of time, cause and effect, and small random occurrences that create sweeping changes in the world. Earthworms' arboreal genocide, death at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River, the courtship of a hawk, the growth of California walnuts, a mutiny on an 18th-century French warship; all strands of an intricate and convoluted web bridging the gap of time and space. Halo around the Moon is a modern-day-mystery of chance encounters, old family secrets, and a tangled history of coincidental past and present events set in the danger and turmoil of a Los Angeles crime investigation.

Matt Ritter is also the author of A Californian's Guide to the Trees among Us (9781597141475) and California Plants (9780999896006) A wonderful addition to any classroom libraryMatt Ritter and illustrator Nayl Gonzalez both live in San Luis Obispo, CA

RAINWALKERS is a story set in the not-so-distant future in a crumbling version of John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley, after the breakup of the United States. A once rich and prosperous agricultural land is now a war-torn nation-state known only as The Valley. To combat chronic droughts, scientists seeded clouds with genetically engineered bacteria that created regular rains but unintentionally made the rains lethal to humans. Anyone caught in the rain dies within seconds, yet there are rumors of people who survive... known as rainwalkers.In a land of forced labor camps and waning oil fields, poverty-stricken agricultural communities support the metropolis of Salinas City and the authoritarian Valley Administration in their unending war against neighboring nations. In desperation, the Valley Administration intensifies their search for rainwalkers, who are believed to be powerful weapons in the border wars, by forcing children housed at Valley schools into the rain to be screened for resistance.War hero Willie Taft lives a quiet agrarian life until the Administration abducts him and his wife, separating them from their daughter. Although his wife is killed during their escape, Willie continues his journey to rescue their daughter. He faces mortal challenges from the Administration military force, the sociopath bounty hunter on his trail, and the ever-present toxic rain. Time is running out as he fights his way through the Valley back to his daughter's school before she is forcefully screened with other children in the deadly rain.