Cutdown

In this gritty thriller, Vietnam vet-turned-lawyer Claude McCutcheon gets a call from Margaret Tikkanen of the Northwestern Pacific Lumber Company. She gives him a trumped-up story about buying commercial property, and he gets tangled up in a decades-old—and life-threatening—conspiracy. Author John A. Miller won the 1996 California Book Award for First Published Work of Fiction for Cutdown, his debut novel.