John Rose Putnam, "Into the Face of the Devil" and much more!

John came west as a young man and settled in Berkeley where he graduated from the University of California. He still lives and writes there and often gives a talk on the California gold rush to the gang at the Freight and Salvage.

He spent a lot of time digging into that gold rush too and many of his stories take place back then. John's characters are so real they'll jump right off the page and talk to you; his villains have hearts as cold as midnight and his heroes almost always do the right thing in the end.

He's working up quite a reputation for his knowledge of that era too. His blog, My Gold Rush Tales, attracted the interest of some TV folks and he appeared in a segment for the Travel Channel about Henry Meiggs, the man who built San Francisco's famous Fisherman's Wharf.

While his first novel, Hangtown Creek, a story of adventure, romance, and coming of age in the early days of the gold rush, was published in 2011, his brand new book, Into the Face of the Devil, moves between Hangtown and the sawmill where James Marshall first found gold, and pits a young man in love for the first time against a killer so evil he could pass for Satan.