In Praise of
A Stranger Here Below: “Some writers are natural story tellers and have an instinct for the reader’s interest. Others have the ability to invoke mood or a sense of place. Still others are able to handle landscape or have the ability to invoke precise imagery.
Every now and then you will find a writer who has all of these qualities, and because of that they invoke the magic of fiction. They make the chair you are sitting on disappear. Charles Fergus is one of those writers, and A Stranger Here Below is one of those books. –
Craig Nova, author of
All the Good Yale Men and
The Good Son“
The kind of mystery Lee Child would have Jack Reacher tackleif he placed a story in the 1830s.” – Michael McMenamin, author of
The Liebold Protocol “Deeply imagined and intricately plotted,
A Stranger Here Below marries richly textured historical fiction with the urgency of a mystery novel.
Fergus knows certain things, deep in the bone: horses, hunting, the folkways of rural places, and he weaves this wisdom into a stirring tale.” –
Geraldine Brooks, author of
March and
People of the Book “
Imbued with Michael Connelly’s gumshoe skills and the vivid historical descriptions of Charles Frazier,
A Stranger Here Below is a stark procedural set in the backwoods of Pennsylvania circa 1830. Charles Fergus displays a deft touch in detailing the rough and tumble life of everyday 19th-century America.”
– Brad Smith, author of
The Return of Kid Cooper and the Virgil Cain mysteries
“With
luminous and deftly sketched prose, Charles Fergus takes us into an American past that is both deeply familiar and utterly strange, through the eyes and thoughts of a young man who is a stranger to his newly chosen community. Sheriff Gideon Stoltz patiently unravels a series of crimes and secrets, while also examining his own life, his past, and the beauties and tragedies of life itself.”
– Jeffrey Lent, author of
Before We Sleep and
In the Fall “
A dark, engrossing tale that introduces a decent, sympathetic hero in the young sheriff Gideon Stoltz. The novel’s special strength, however, is its imaginative saturation in the community of Adamant, a violent, haunted place of dreams and visions, a place as hard and unforgiving as its name.”
– Castle Freeman, Jr., author of
The Devil in the Valley “In Gideon Stoltz,
Charles Fergus has created a unique 19th-century Eastern lawman who struggles not only with wrongdoers but with his own griefs and travails.
A Stranger Here Below kept me reading late into the night.”
– Dan O’Brien, author of
The Indian Agent and
Stolen Horses “Fergus puts you firmly in Gideon Stoltz’s rough-hewn world where a ‘foreigner’ with the wrong accent has to watch his back even if he wears a sheriff’s badge.
A cracking good mystery, and a window to the time when our young country was still a dark and treacherous place.” –
Scott Weidensaul, author of
The First Frontier “Charles Fergus’s gifts for invoking time and place empower him to tell
an irresistible tale of extraordinary people and the past that haunts them.”
– Paul Schullery, author of
The Time Traveler’s Tale and
Diamond Jubilee"[A] rich novel of a distant time and a man who is “Othered” in most aspects of his life . . . Although the book is clearly crime fiction, it is equally an exploration of the soul in the presence of death and wrongdoing. Which is, after all, what a “stranger here below” can expect." -- The New York Journal of Books
"A writer of nonfiction about the natural world, Fergus brings his appreciation for nature to this well-paced blend of mystery and western. Gideon is a classic lawman, tough when he has to be but able to weep when an influenza epidemic rips through town, leaving empty cradles in its wake. An appealing debut that deserves a boost from enthusiastic hand-sellers."--Booklist
“Simply put, I loved this novel. It works as a compelling and complex historical mystery, but it’s more. The characters struggle mightily with the evil around them, trying to find purpose in a world that is frequently brutal and unforgiving. But they carry on. They find meaning in their connections to others, in song, in following dogs into thickets. Their lives are perpetually caught between beauty and violence, compassion and cruelty, love and hate. . . . The details, whether of a grouse’s feathers or a horse’s gait or burning charcoal for an iron mill, are flawless. Fergus has a curious naturalist’s attention to detail. This is a gem. I hope we see more of Gideon Stoltz in the future.” —Matthew Miller, Nature.com, The Nature Conservancy blog
"If you've grown tired of formulaic mysteries and thrillers, then you're in for a treat with A Stranger Here Below . . . The characters are built not from cliches, but through Fergus's deft descriptions of their thoughts, desires, and secrets, all while creating a tone that keeps the reader entranced . . . A pleasure to read. -- Elaine Meder-Wilgus, WPSU's BookMark
