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Book Details
Crime Thriller / Suspense
Date Published: 09-07-2026
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Turtle Lake is a gripping tale of revenge, survival, and the intricate interplay between human nature and the natural world. The story follows Jim Peters, the comptroller at Ramsey Motors, who uncovers a corrupt scheme by the company and its insurer, U.S. Underwriters, to defraud employees of their retirement and insurance benefits before moving operations overseas. Infuriated, he devises an elaborate extortion plan to expose their corruption and protect the employees through a spectacular plot that ends up achieving national headlines. To accomplish his plan, Peters uses simple, everyday methods and lessons learned from alpha predators in the natural world.
Excerpt
Life is a dangerous place to be. The woods, skies, lakes, and oceans are filled with creatures bent on killing and eating each other. Nothing in nature dies of old age, as the adage goes.
Prey animals are taken down by predators. It’s as if prey animals are made to be food. Carnivore predators possess razor-sharp canine-like teeth. Carnivores are the watchers from the shadows. All of them, such as lions, tigers, bobcats, and wolves, are wired the same way. They don’t eat lettuce for lunch. To a carnivore, you simply look like another rabbit in the grass.
There’s another carnivore that is often overlooked – humans. Humans have canine teeth. They are born wired with the same instincts as the alpha predators.
We’re taught to control it. Supposedly.
Birds will tell you when the sun is going to come up. At the faintest glimmer of dawn’s early light, they begin to converse with each other, presumably to find out where the bugs are that day. Usually, we don’t hear them in their earliness. Our day starts later. Usually.
Frogs and insects do the same during the pre-dawn moments, buzzing and croaking in the woods, fields, and swamps. Presumably they do this to find out where the predators are. It’s been said that frogs might be telling each other where the rattlesnakes and blue herons are at any given time. We don’t usually hear them croaking away in the early hours of the day. Usually.
Today, however, as the woods came to life with this early morning serenade, Jim Peters could hear them very clearly. It was August of 1990. He was in his cabin in mid-Michigan, situated on the edge of a quiet, deep-woods nature refuge known as Turtle Lake. Peters was lying
in bed backwards, that is, with his feet at the head of the bed and his head at the foot of the bed, chin resting on his wrists as he looked at a model train set.
The train set, an ancient Lionel from the 1940s, included buildings, roads, bridges, cars, trucks, a shopping center, and a train running through it. The set looked ordinary enough to the casual passerby or rare visitor to the cabin. But in fact, it was window dressing, a model of the crime scene that was to come. The train had nothing to do with it.
In a short while, when the birds, frogs, and bugs had quieted down, Peters would push a button and Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute would float from the speakers connected to his compact disc machine. Peters liked Mozart. The music was pure and uncluttered. It flowed from one section into another so smoothly that it was hard to tell a transition had taken place. The complexities of its composition flowed as smoothly as pouring oil.
As smoothly as the diabolical scam he was planning.
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Author Details
Bob Milne has been hailed throughout his 60-year career as one of the best ragtime/boogie-woogie piano players of all time. A solo concert performer, he traveled all over the world playing for dignitaries and celebrities as well as small town audiences. He was given the title of National Treasure by the Library of Congress and deemed an Ambassador of Music by the U.S. Department of State.
Bob’s extraordinary musical abilities were the subject of numerous brain studies, which have inspired a popular RadioLab podcast.
Little did they know that Bob was also a talented writer.
For years he wrote articles about his saloon-playing days for music publications. Many of these stories were compiled into a book called The Journeyman Piano Player: Adventures in Gracious Dining. Bob has written reams of poetry, some of which became lyrics to songs that he composed. The longest piece of poetry he ever wrote was the lyric book for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a grand opera he composed and orchestrated.
Mr. Milne has been fascinated by nature his entire life. At a young age he realized that instincts are present in all species of birds, mammals (including humans), and literally every living thing in nature. He has used this information countless times over his lifetime to predict what the human species will do in future situations.
Bob is now retired from the long piano tours and is enjoying his woodland home. Today he spends his time studying nature in the woods. Signed copies of his book may be purchased through his website.
Contact Links
Website: https://www.robertmilneauthor.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robert.milne.790
Purchase Link
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Lake-Wild-Card-Syndrome/dp/1968761624/
