Out Now from Poisoned Pen Press
Excerpt >> Read Chapter 1 of Artscape (pdf)

The sun, still low in the east, heated the morning air and sent it shimmering off the asphalt. The humidity, which had hovered around sixty percent all night, began its gradual ascent into the nineties, and people who, an hour or two earlier, started their day showered and crisp, acquired the wilted look that comes with summer in southwest Virginia. And summer in southwest Virginia begins in May.

It is an area blessed with mild winters, pleasant autumns, and breathtaking, beautiful springs, all compressed into seven months. The remaining five make summer. The procession of the seasons, thus compressed and distorted, characterizes the area and shapes the personalities of those who live there.

Ike Schwartz grew up in Picketsville, a town tucked away in the southwest corner of the Old Dominion. For all of his boyhood, Ike took it as a natural course of events that God intended life to be this way. It wasn’t until he went to school in Massachusetts and experienced the splendor of New England’s weather, deep snow in winter, gentle springs, summers which were warm by day, cool by night, and those blazing golden and red falls, that he realized there might be something better to look forward to from May through September than a shirt permanently sweat-plastered to his back and the inevitable lethargy that overtook everyone by three in the afternoon.