Roadside Rest: Another Maine Mystery

With Roadside Rest, Robert Chute returns to Wyman Falls. Readers of Coming Home and Return to Sender will recognize many of the characters and much of the landmarks in this mystery set in post Korean War rural Maine. Mystery unfolds as a fellow from West Virginia comes to town with a deed to property owned by Willis Wyman and James Johnson. The West Virginian goes missing. There are more questions than answers in an investigation that includes quirky town characters. Meanwhile Jim Johnson is missing in action from Korea. Enjoy this story as it takes you around the world and back to Maine with nonstop action revealed through Chutes' prose-that, like his poetry, is, "careful language, precise, with a sparse beauty."

Nancy Grape of Maine Sunday Telegram said about Coming Home: A Maine Mystery, "All in all, Chute has created a fast moving story, Coming Home exudes a genuine sense of Maine's landscape and how that landscape works to shape its people...Don't look for movie-star characterization...They don't flourish among the granite rocks and sandy shores that nourish this suspenseful story... the genuine article-men and women strong at the core, steady as the wind blows and poised to protect and preserve their heritage...It is a lasting Maine story and Chute has told it well."

About Return to Sender Bill Bushnell in the Kennebec Journal said, "Chute is a clever, thoughtful writer, creating a story true to the color and atmosphere of rural Maine during the Korean War era, right down to the 1950s-era social taboos of homosexuality and illicit drug use, and the loneliness of fathers away at war...Chute has a sure hit mystery here.

About the author: Chute is a seventh generation Maine native. A retired professor of biology, most of his nonscientific writing has been poetic in nature. He is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Bates College and served as director of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area. He lives on Middle Range Pond in Poland, Maine.