Marble and Mud

Stewart's Camp, California, is just a tiny, rusty place, forgotten amongst the hills of the Gold Country, but it's also a town with a past. And the past tends to visit the present--with or without invitation.

In 1996, eight months before historic storms deluge Northern California, idealistic young nurse, Lauren, arrives in the remote Gold Rush town of Stewart's Camp. She's come because of a house, an old one with character, just the sort she's always wanted and finally has. Sort of. It's bigger than she pictured it, filthy, run-down, packed with junk, and soaked in foreboding, but Lauren won't be deterred. Determined to clean up the mess and find her place in this community of endearingly flawed individuals, she begins a daunting restoration project and an unlikely apprenticeship with the town's aged healer. But Lauren's plans are disrupted by the return to town of Gwendolyn, a business-minded madam with her own claim to the old Stewart Mansion and her own plans for the place, plans that will force Lauren to fight for her inheritance and plans that could push Stewart's Camp to its breaking point, putting it on course toward the reenactment of a dark past.

K. E. Thompson's debut novel and the first in the Stewart's Camp Saga, Marble and Mud explores a world of dark redemption and earthy transcendence deeply rooted in place and time. Thompson believes in maximizing the page-turning power of a good plot without sacrificing depth or the extraordinary power of fiction to tell the complicated truth.