Bad Ground

Book excerpt: The novel is almost a hymn to the working man. – Booklist (starred). Deep in the earth, brilliant clusters of quartz crystals lie hidden. Such treasures can only be found in the fractured, unstable, and dangerous hard-rock miners call bad ground. When his mother dies, seventeen-year-old Jeremy Pines seeks out his estranged uncle, a badly scarred and bitter recluse – and a hard-rock miner. When not underground, Uncle Aiden is usually holed up in his apartment. But Jeremy’s presence – and the memory he evokes – changes everything for both.