Author Joseph Heywood starts new U.P. series

U.P. author Joseph Heywood has the first book out this month in what might be a new series following a game warden in the Upper Peninsula. Unlike his current Grady Service series, “Woods Cop,” the new “Red Jacket: A Lute Bapcat Mystery” is set in the year 1913.

It’ll be published September 18 by Lyons Press and is a fictional novel through the eyes of a game warden in the early twentieth century, a time of a lot of upheaval and change in the U.P.

Heywood spends summers at his camp near Newberry, and each year, takes a few weeks of that short U.P. summer to go on patrol with Michigan DNR officers to research his books.

His new character, Lute Bapcat, came about through that research, and wondering how different a game warden’s life and job would be in the early days of the U.P. (We’re guessing, pretty different.) It’s set near Calumet, which at that time was called Red Jacket, and had a booming copper mine industry. It was the biggest city in Michigan at the time with a population upward of 80,000, many of them immigrants.

Expect to see union organizers, culture clashes, and plenty of interesting new characters, at least according to the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly:

“Heywood’s absorbing first in a new series. Outsized characters, both real (athlete George Gipp before his Notre Dame fame, union organizer Mother Jones) and fictional (randy businesswoman Jaquelle Frei; Lute’s Russian companion, Pinkhus Sergeyevich Zakov), pepper the narrative,” reads the review.

Writer: Sam Eggleston
Source: Joseph Heywood