Thunder on the Mountain — David Poyer

David Poyer, well-known for his Navy thrillers, has been writing a series of ambitious novels set in the fictional Hemlock County, Pennsylvania, at various points in history in the last century, and involving families and characters that recur from book to book. The western Pennsylvania oil country, the historic area where the American oil industry was founded, spawned Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's fortune, and perhaps even the Sherman anti-trust laws, as well as generations of labor strife, but also borders some of the last virgin forest in the Eastern U.S. It is one of the cradles of the discontents of contemporary America.


Now Poyer returns to the terrible winter of 1936, and the strike to organize the workers in the Thunder Oil Company after a refinery disaster exposes the company's neglect of workers' safety. Our hero, the Tom Joad-like W. T. Halvorsen, earns the nickname "Red" when he becomes a leader of the strike against Daniel Thunner's family company, a strike that draws national attention, and the arrival of professional strikebreaker Pearl Deatherage and of CIO organizer Doris Golden. As the strike spreads in scale and violence, Halvorsen, Thunner and their ideas of honor and morality are put to the test. This is a tough, penetrating, violent novel in the American tradition that goes from Faulkner and Steinbeck to E. L. Doctorow and Mary Lee Settle to, now, David Poyer.