When The Whistling Stopped

Tom Young, still lamenting the death of his Chilean fiancé thirty years earlier, returns to southern Chile. When thousands of black-necked swans disappear, it is an environmental disaster. What’s going on!

He meets a handsome young couple, Amanda and Carlos, who suspect a new paper mill is poisoning the waters of the swans’ refuge, and set out to prove it. The amoral mill owner, financially strapped, can’t let them succeed, and will do anything to stop them, including murder.

When middle-aged Lilia, tortured by the memory of being raped when she was twelve years old, meets Tom, he feels a stirring he hasn’t felt since before his fiancée’s tragic death. She too is attracted to him, but they are soon caught up in the mill owner’s violent attempts to silence Amanda and Carlos, with disastrous results.

The tragic, surprising, and, finally, hopeful twists and turns of this fast-paced, environmental drama make it difficult to put down.

David J. Mather graduated from Bowdoin College before joining the Peace Corps. After spending two life-altering years as the most isolated volunteer in Chile, he returned to the United States where he carved out a homestead in the New Hampshire woods. He became a self-educated forester that led to starting and operating his own specialty lumber company for more than thirty years. Throughout that time, he traveled around the world, primarily focusing on third-world countries.

His first novel, One For The Road, was published in 2011 and was based on his Peace Corps experience. While doing research in Chile for the book, he learned of the heartbreaking plight of the largest population of black-necked swans in South America. This prompted him to write the sequel entitled When the Whistling Stopped.