Jim Stallings

Devil's Hopper Jim Stallings

In the new millennium hamlet of Marktree, Massachusetts (just west of Boston), the Pongawog Indian tribe has gained the right to dock a Long House casino boat on their sacred territory along the meandering Charles River. During excavation of the dock, two bodies are exhumed from a cold spring bog. Their mysterious appearance sets off a chain of strange events that unravels the history of the town and turns the lives of its citizens inside out.

Key to this mystery and its solution are a spirit circle of psychics operating through the local Unitarian parish; like their spiritualist ancestors they attempt to solve the mystery of the bog couple through psychic means combined with historical research. History recapitulates itself age after age; and as the ancient wisdom warns: the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children. Yet carrying on in the old way of hard scrabble Yankees, these citizens of Marktree muster up like the Minutemen of old, and press on through the round of four seasons into an uncertain, but perhaps redeemable, way of life.