Halo Around The Moon: A Novel - Hardcover

Ritter, Matt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0999896059 ISBN 13: 9780999896051

Publisher: Matt Ritter, 2022

Synopsis

MONTAIGNE MEDAL AWARD FINALIST

In his intriguing and unexpected second novel, Biology Professor Matt Ritter delivers a strange and startling generational tale of hardship and triumph in the American West. Natural science blends with history, and an unforeseen chain of causation emerges. In current day Los Angeles, UCLA Professor Marcus Melter is called to the scene of a gruesome murder by his friend, Detective Jack Bratton. While the case leads them into a mysterious world of crime and conspiracy, we learn about the bizarre history of these two men's connected families. Ritter uses his keen natural history observations and unerring sense of place to spin a haunting narrative of intertwined families moving between continents and across the American West, each ultimately affecting the other's path. Marcus and Jack become the axis around which Ritter spins an interconnected story of time, cause and effect, and small random occurrences that create sweeping changes in the world. Earthworms' arboreal genocide, death at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River, the courtship of a hawk, the growth of California walnuts, a mutiny on an 18th-century French warship; all strands of an intricate and convoluted web bridging the gap of time and space. Halo around the Moon is a modern-day-mystery of chance encounters, old family secrets, and a tangled history of coincidental past and present events set in the danger and turmoil of a Los Angeles crime investigation.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Matt Ritter is one of California's premier plant experts specializing in cultivated trees, a world-renowned researcher of Eucalyptus trees, and an award-winning teacher. He attended UC Santa Barbara to earn a bachelor's degree in microbiology and UC San Diego for a Ph.D. in plant biology. Dr. Ritter is currently a botany professor in the biology department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and has authored numerous scientific papers as well as three California natural history guidebooks. He won the Cal Poly Distinguished Teaching Award, the International Society of Arboriculture's Excellence in Education Award, and the California Urban Forests Council's Excellence in Education Award. In addition to these achievements, Dr. Ritter served as Editor-in-Chief of Madroño, the journal of the California Botanical Society, is the California coordinator of the U.S. National Register of Big Trees, and a contributing author to the Flora of North America project. He has written several notable books including natural history guidebooks, adult fiction, and children's literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Matt Ritter
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0999896059
• ISBN 13: 9780999896051
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248