The Fly Farmer

In small towns, there are no coincidences, only conspiracies. Or so Chinook Oregon’s only Fly Farmer told the sheriff of Chinook Oregon right after three hundred pounds of rotting whale blubber fell out of the sky and crushed his van.

Local attorney Martin Lindstrom first met Chuck Jones after his hometown Chinook Oregon decided to dispose of a beached whale with dynamite, prompting dozens of lawsuits. “You can’t imagine the greed a little whale blubber can inspire,” complains Lindstrom, who is the town’s outside legal counsel.

Unlike the others, Jones quickly settles the case for an absurdly small amount and sets about establishing himself as the biggest and only Fly Farmer on the North Coast of Oregon, supplying flies to academic researchers and colored maggots to fishermen. Within months, he is on the front page of the local newspaper dressed up like Dr. Frankenstein under the headline “Maggot Mogul,” predicted how universities and researchers from all over the world, will be using his flies decode the secrets of human behavior—why people drink too much, lose their hair, cheat on their taxes, get fat, lie to their best friends, screw up their children, buy clothes that don’t fit, pick fights they can’t win and elect morons to public office.

But, as Lindstrom gets to know his new neighbor, he discovers that Jones had another reason for moving to Chinook. The Fly Farmer is writing a book on the death of a jazz singer in the early 1990s who died just before she was going to provide damning evidence in a corruption scandal at the state capital in Salem Oregon. Right after the whale is blasted, the woman’s bones appear inside cars owned by Martin Lindstrom and other prominent Chinook residents, the “Jonah Whale Murder.” As more bodies turn up, speculation mounts of either a serial killer being on the loose or someone carrying out a deadly coverup.

To solve the crimes, Lindstrom is forced to dig deep into his communities past, diving into long forgotten stories of the cold war and bloody battles to unionize timber workers in the 1930s that lead him into the present day, when Federal immigration officers start deporting dozens of illegal immigrants who work in the dairy industry.