JT Conroe

The Tower Maker - an adventure novel:

In 1929, a West Texas cattle rancher had a staggering religious vision in which he and his male progeny were commanded by God to build a tower. The purpose of the tower was not revealed. Its construction was to be a matter of faith.

Seventy-two years later, Sam Sudro continues to honor his grandfather’s commitment as did his deeply religious father, but his faith in it has been gradually eroding, especially after his wife and two sons moved away out of frustration with its suffocating influence on their lives. Now he lives alone on his ranch. The cattle were sold long ago. Only a minor oil well sustains Sam and his endless work on the tower.

Far away in a former Soviet republic lives a small ethnic community called the Scyths, supposed descendents of the ancient Scythians. Having been forcibly relocated by Josef Stalin from their original home in the Caucasus to the barren steppes of Central Asia, they subsist on the verge of extinction because of a series of ecological disasters left behind by the long departed Soviet bureaucrats.

Sam is completely unaware that his straight and narrow life is about to take a strange turn toward a place where his fate and that of the Scyths become entangled by the unpredictable winds of war.