Book excerpt: Award-winning writer of Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey, winner of the 2020 Will Rogers Medallion Award, a 2019 Spur Award Finalist and an “Editor’s Choice” by The Historical Novel Society While Tyler Raintree’s parents are divorcing, the mother hides her son from his abusive father at Camp Itawa in the mountains of north Georgia. There, young Tyler meets nineteen-year-old camp counselor Stoney St. Ney and Bobby Whitehorse, a full-blooded Cherokee man. These two staffers become the boy’s bodyguards and teachers as they try to protect him and his mother from a father who has connections to organized crime. All seems to go well for a time, as Tyler is introduced to the forest and the ways of the Native Americans who had once lived on the land. When the mafia comes to the mountains to abduct the boy, the gangsters must step onto the foreign playing field of wilderness, where Stoney and Bobby are most “at home.” Praise for Mark Warren “Woven with clarity and colorful prose, Warren leads readers on an odyssey . . .” —True West Magazine on Promised Land “A good book offers the ultimate escape . . . armchair travel to those wild places of the imagination. Warren’s book took me to places I had previously not expected to visit, but I’m really glad I went there. —New Zealand Booklovers on Promised Land "Warren's novel paints a vivid picture . . . and its colorful similes will put a smile on any genre-fiction lover's face." —Booklist on Born to the Badge