Hoback flees to Wyoming to escape the big city violence that cost 
him his wife and almost turned him into a killer. Life is good in 
Hardwater until somebody butchers three people like deer, packs 
their bodies with uranium ore, and sends Hoback a poem, 
challenging him to stop the killing. The poet reveals an intimate 
knowledge of Hoback's violent past—and a perverse and terrifying 
interest in his son. This haunting tale of murder, betrayal, and a 
father's love takes place in a Wyoming uranium-mining town set in 
the middle of the wildest, most beautiful country south of Alaska.

     "A worthy winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize, Hardwater 
has style, pace and punch. Its picture of the contemporary American 
West is on the money. Every turn of the page leaves a reader 
wondering, What next?, both in the story and in Sherwood's career."
—Mike Mewshaw

    "Steve Sherwood's Hardwater has everything you'd want in a thriller, 
not the least of which is a richly evocative sense of place: the high left 
corner of Wyoming up near Yellowstone, in a town where failed 
uranium mines have left the bitter taste of failure in white men's 
mouths and the area's resident reservation Shoshones and Arapahos 
find themselves literally at war with farmers and ranchers over water 
rights. When the editor of the local rag there gets hot on the trail of a 
serial killer or a poet with a macabre sense of humor, you have got a 
bang-on good contemporary Western."—C. W. Smith 

_________________________________________________________

STEVE SHERWOOD, director of the William L. Adams Center for 
Writing at TCU, has published essays and fiction in numerous 
magazines and journals. With Christina Murphy he edited the St. 
Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors (1995) and with Murphy and 
Joe Law he compiled Writing Centers: An Annotated Bibliography 
(Greenwood Press, 1996).