Meadowlark Press announces the release of Saltwood, a thriller by Leon Unruh. The novel is set in Wichita and in the area surrounding the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge in central Kansas. 

In Saltwood, a former Russian assassin using the alias Nick Deveraux has become a mysterious American hero but is kept under wraps following his spectacular capture. The FBI releases him after two years, right into the hands of the Russian mob. He is coerced to complete his previous assignment — kill the Senate’s last moderate conservative and finds himself caught between the twin grindstones of oil money and religious power. Deveraux becomes oddly aligned with both the senator’s deputy and a woman who has made herself regionally famous by promising to kill an unidentified person in Kansas. Saltwood is the second book in the Dog of the Afterworld series.

Robert Rebein, author of The Last Rancher, writes, “Leon Unruh writes about secret agents and assassins like the second coming of John le Carré, but his true subject is Kansas — the good, the bad, and (yes) the ugly of it. With Saltwood, the second of his Nick Deveraux novels, Unruh gives us guns in mega churches, a Russian hitman, and a United States senator bought by Big Oil, but that’s only half of it. We also get Kellogg and Douglas, the dwindling Arkansas, the shocking (and endangered) beauty of Quivira National Wildlife Refuge. Reading this book, I saw the people and the land I love in a strange and fascinating new light. I couldn’t put it down.”

Leon Unruh, who grew up in Pawnee Rock, was an editor at newspapers in Austin and Dallas, Texas; Wichita; and Anchorage, Alaska. He was later the editor at the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He lives in Tucson, Ariz. 

Meadowlark Press, established in Emporia in 2014, publishes novels, memoirs, and children’s books with a focus on Midwest settings and authors. The press encourages book orders through independent bookstores and from the press’s website at meadowlarkbookstore.com