Murder in the Catskills

When Ward Eastman stumbles upon a skeleton in rugged terrain near the hamlet of South Branch, he finds himself enmeshed amid layers of genealogy, history, and topography as he unravels the truth behind the chilling discovery.

Norman Van Valkenburgh, himself a licensed surveyor and 32-year veteran of the New York State Department of Conservation, weaves into this entertaining whodunit a wealth of local history and vivid depiction of familiar Catskills locales. Readers who love mysteries and the Catskills will find themselves both diverted and enriched by Van Valkenburgh’s blend of suspense and local lore.  There’s plenty of intriguing detail about the surveyor’s art to boot, as Eastman — enroute to solving the murder — follows in the footsteps of those intrepid surveyors, the Catskills’ original explorers, who mapped out the lines of the vast Hardenburgh Patent centuries ago.

“Knowing the local terrain as only a good surveyor can, Van Valkenburgh has filled his first novel with a wonderful assortment of true Catskills detail.  He knows how the forests that blanket our mountains look and feel when walking through them in different seasons. He knows the taciturn manner in which long friendships unfold in deep hollows. And he knows a lot about local history.” — the Daily Freeman