On a night of torrential rain, a warrior appears near the
Colombia River, where the Chinook people thrived before the
hydroelectric dams came and changed their entire way of life. He
has come to reclaim the river, to return it to its original
majesty.
Soon after, government employees are found murdered with
elaborate harpoons. As the body count grows, Francine Smohalla, a
government marine biologist of Chinook and white descent, embarks
on her own investigation of the bizarre murders. As she desperately
tries to find the killer and prevent any other murders, she finds
herself spinning in the convergence of ethnic hatreds between
Indians and whites, an unlikely relationship with a kindred spirit
whose troubled life has led him to contemplate terrorism and
apocalypse, an ancient prophecy about the return of her beloved
salmon, and the giant dams on the Columbia that loom large and as
seemingly immovable as the mountains themselves. A River Out of
Eden is a gripping literary thriller straight from today’s
headlines set against the uniquely American contradictions of the
Pacific Northwest.