Former Fircrest employee writes suspense novel set in rehab center

Local author, Mark Allan Johnson, born in Port Angeles, presently living in Everett, worked for more than thirty-five years with the intellectually challenged at Fircrest in Shoreline. He has written a novel which explores their seldom seen world.

The Havenwood Rehabilitation Center is “The Last Resort” that offers care to those with the most profound needs. This mystery weaves suspense and humor in a story of the residents at Havenwood, their care staff and those determined to close the facility, disguising political and financial ambition with a politically correct agenda of privatization into community homes.

“THE LAST RESORT”

Mark Allan Johnson

294 pages
Fiction / Mystery & Detective

Available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com

The Last Resort by Mark Allan Johnson

The Story: Patrick Curran works the nightshift at Havenwood, a State facility for the intellectually challenged on the outskirts of Seattle in the newly incorporated City of Bitter Bay. He feels sheltered under the cover of darkness until the morning one of his residents discovers a skeleton in the crawlspace of an abandoned cottage slated for demolition.

State Senator Mason Manning is campaigning to close Havenwood as a costly and obsolete institution. He also wants to be governor. Unfortunately for him, the skeletons in his closet include the one found under Ash Hall where he worked the summer between high school graduation and college entrance.

Jillian Danvers, lawyer and legal guardian for her brother Danny, who lives at Havenwood, receives a letter from his housemate, Grady Hayward, claiming he can identify the skeleton, sending Patrick and Jillian on a perilous hunt with her crisis-craving law partner, Lisa Adler.

On the treacherous trail to the Quileute Reservation town of La Push, they are pursued by deceitful handymen and unskilled kidnappers before teaming with Tribal Police Officer, Andrew Jackson, who harbors a deep distaste for casinos, smoke shops and bodies washing up to defile his holy beach. This unlikely company of strangers discovers a truth that refuses to remain buried.