Lost Creek Books of La Pine, Oregon has just released the new mystery-suspense novel, �A Homeless Man�s Burden: She was only nine,� by Pleasant Hill High School alumnus Wesley Scott Murphey (class of 1975). This 306 page book is a fast-moving present-day fiction story about an actual, still-unsolved child-murder that occurred in a Trent, Oregon bean field in 1960, back in the days when tens of thousands of kids and adults spent their summers picking beans for local bean farmers all over the Pacific Northwest. (See Register-Guard article, "50 year search for justice, 8-15-10 online for huge coverage of actual case.)

Murphey's story takes place in the Pleasant Hill-Dexter-Lost Creek area, uses real locations, and has numerous references to Pleasant Hill high school and some of your old stomping grounds. The book has a great mix of humor, light-romance, nostalgia, conflict and suspense. If you ever picked beans as a kid, (like so many PH alumnus did) this book will be especially nostalgic for you.

In Murphey�s new book, a modern-day fur trapper encounters a homeless, old man, dying alone in his sleeping bag, on the bank of the McKenzie River. Before dying, the old man gives a partial confession concerning the bean field murder fifty years earlier. Taking the old man�s burden, the trapper teams up with his life-long friend�a short-fused, sarcastic, ex-cop, private-investigator�to solve the fifty year old case.

�A Homeless Man�s Burden� is the fourth mystery-suspense novel written by Wesley Murphey, but the first to be released. Lost Creek Books will be bringing out Murphey�s other three novels over the next eighteen months. Murphey previously had two non-fiction outdoor books published in the mid-nineties, most notably, �Blacktail Deer Hunting Adventures,� and he has also had many outdoor articles published.

�A Homeless Man�s Burden�, sells for $15.95 and is available for purchase at local bookstores; through numerous non-bookstore outlets; from Lost Creek Books, PO Box 3084, La Pine, OR 97739 (postpaid $15.95);