Tamarack River Ghost: When Progress Stirs the Dead and Divides the Living

When the hogs move in, all hell threatens to break loose--on land, online, and maybe even from beyond the grave.

Josh Wittmore is a young journalist with a passion for telling the truth. When he transfers from the Illinois bureau of Farm Country News to its national office in rural Wisconsin, he expects a quieter pace--but instead stumbles into the biggest and most divisive story of his career.

A powerful agribusiness corporation plans to build an enormous hog farm in the scenic Tamarack River Valley, promising jobs and prosperity. But as residents of Ames County clash over the proposal, concerns mount about pollution, way of life, and the fate of the tight-knit farming community. Josh works to stay objective, even as his paper struggles to survive a shift to digital-only ownership under a slick New York investor. To make matters stranger, eerie stories about a ghostly logger haunting the valley begin to feel uncomfortably real.

Tamarack River blends investigative drama with rural folklore, pitting modern industry against tradition--and asking whether community, journalism, and the land itself can survive the tide of change.

Jerry Apps was born and raised on a farm in central Wisconsin. Upon graduation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and spending time in the U.S. Army, Apps worked as a county extension agent in Green Lake and Brown County Wisconsin. He then worked as a staff development specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Extension. He is Professor Emeritus of the University Wisconsin-Madison and the author of several fiction and non-fiction books about agriculture and rural life in the Upper Midwest.