Who is Timothy Egan

[Robert Anton-Erik <anton933@uidaho.edu>]

I did a search at amazon.com on T. Egan.

Titles
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The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest
Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West
Portrait of Seattle
Breaking Blue

And, the text of a review of Breaking Blue from amazon:

>From Kirkus Reviews , April 1, 1992
Powerhouse story of an iconoclastic sheriff who cracked through 54 years
of police coverups and solved the oldest open murder case in the
country. Beginning with a brilliant evocation of 1935 Spokane and Pend
Oreille County, Egan (Seattle bureau chief of The New York Times; The Good
Rain, 1990) sets the scene for the killing of Spokane town marshal George
Conniff, who had surprised men stealing butter from the local creamery. In
the fifth year of the Depression, Spokane was full of reluctant
hobos--many of them farmers who had fled the dust bowls of the
Midwest--living, hungry for food and work, in a Hooverville by the local
rail yards. The Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money
from these ``vagrants'' and collected also from the bootleggers, saloons,
whorehouses, Chinese lotteries, and opium dens in the ``Queen City of the
Richest Empire in the Western Hemisphere.'' When a shortage doubled the
price of butter, 6'3'' rock-fisted Detective Clyde Ralstin and his partner
profitably robbed dairies until the night that Conniff was killed. Ralstin
was fingered for the killing by fellow detective Charles Sonnabend, but
Sonnabend was ordered by the brass to stop investigating, and Ralstin
disappeared. Fifty-four years later, in 1989, 47-year-old Sheriff Anthony
Bamonte--former logger, Vietnam vet, Spokane cop--was writing his master's
thesis on the ten previous sheriffs of Pend Oreille County and discovered
a 1955 deathbed statement by Sonnabend about the coverup. Bamonte began to
probe the case and, amazingly, men and women in their 80s and 90s who had
known Ralstin came forward. Egan's narration of Bamonte's methodical
stalking, of the ring of paranoia tightening around Ralstin (living in a
tiny Montana town and knowing of the hunt), and of murder refusing to stay
buried after 54 years--all make for compulsive, white-knuckle
reading. Egan rises into the Most Wanted group of true-crime writers with
this smoothly told, exciting account. -- Copyright )1992, Kirkus
Associates, LP. All rights reserved. 

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Robert Anton-Erik 
anton933@uidaho.edu 
http://www.ets.uidaho.edu/rob/

"The medium is not the message,
 the message is the message."
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