Crooked River Saga with Dan Gray

Sept 12, 2023 - Hear Wayland resident Dan Gray share his first novel, Crooked River Saga, a tale that blends fact and fantasy into a spellbinding saga of the Pacific Northwest.
Who killed Arne Vitner? That is the mystery that will span four generations and pull together friends and family from around the world. Set in a small town, that does exist under a different name, the mystery will require everything from a group of modern friends and time-spanning characters to save the town from a threat most can't believe exists.
Dan Gray was born in Seattle in 1949. The doctor who attended his birth was Dr. Prewitt, who fifteen years later was to diagnose an abdominal pain Dan had suffered with for a month as acute appendicitis, a condition the local doctors up in the Stillaguamish valley had somehow missed.
In spite of the appendix setback Dan returned to work in the woods, helping his father build a vacation community that eventually came to be known as “Jordan River Trails,” an experience which led to bankruptcy (as his father’s ventures usually did), and to Dan’s lifelong distrust of real estate brokers from Seattle.
Dan graduated from high school in 1967, and to his surprise, was given a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, which his grandfather highly esteemed because Clarence Darrow taught at the Law School. Grandpa was a union man whose blackballing in Chicago led to Dan’s being born in Washington State instead of the south side of Chicago.
After graduating from the University, Dan had two careers, neither of which had anything to do with his studies at that august institution. In spite of this oddity, Dan kept faith with his high school reputation as the class poet. He continued to write. By chance he stumbled upon a long-out of print history of his home county in Washington.
This is where he learned of the heinous crime that plagued him for decades, as he fought his way through the complexities of language to write the novel of lives lived in the shadow of an historic sin.
He now lives with his daughter, her husband and his granddaughters in Wayland and continues to write.