Incident at Simms Center

G.P. Schultz has won the Thorpe Menn Award for his novel, Incident at Simms Center. The award is named after the longtime literary editor of the Kansas City Star. George Gurley - Kansas City Star. When newspaper reporter Marcie Peterson is sent to Simms Center to report on the growing power of a right wing political organization, she quickly realizes that underneath the surface of this picture postcard community lies a volcanic hotbed of insurrection that threatens at any moment to explode into violence. She files stories that blaze across national headlines, giving a powerful voice to citizens fed up with bureaucratic interference in their lives. As tension builds between Simms Center and the government, Marcie is drawn into the lives of the townspeople. There's the mysterious Pawnee indian, Chief Chaote, who harbors an ancient grudge against the white man, and will use the crisis to further his own ends. There's Professor Elliot, an eloquent voice for the people's rights and Jeffersonian democracy, and his beautiful daughter Jennifer, an award winning photojournalist who has recently returned with her husband to Simms Center. And there's Jim Simms, a rancher, descendent of the town's founders, a calming presence in the community and a man desperately in love with Jennifer. Finally, there's Jim's best friend Bobby Cottrell, a handsome but troubled Vietnam veteran whose family farm has been driven into foreclosure by government policy. Marcie finds herself falling in love with Bobby, even as his unresolved internal war threatens to be the undoing of everyone around him.It's up to Herb Tully, aging veteran of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and Ward Garrett of the Kansas Highway Patrol, to join forces to try to find out who's responsible for the escalating violence that holds the town hostage. Is it the radical Posse Comitatus? The FBI? The CIA? Are officials at the highest levels of the government involved? Can the truth be learned in time to save Bobby Cottrell from his own demons -and the town from disaster?