‘Whiskey Rebel’

MOSES LAKE — Out in the high desert country of Moses Coulee, it’s easy to imagine that strange things are happening just over the next ridge. There’s something peacefully secretive about the area northwest of Ephrata in the southern part of Douglas County, as though time stopped there and nobody was around to notice. 

“Every place is fascinating, and there's nothing more fascinating than a place that's that many people seem to fly over or not care about,” said novelist Jeffrey Dunn, whose novel “Whiskey Rebel” is set in Moses Coulee. “Whiskey River” was released May 9 and made its debut at Auntie’s Books in Spokane, Dunn’s adopted hometown. 

“Whiskey Rebel” is a buddy story of sorts, Dunn said. It follows Punxie Tawney, a post-traumatic Iraq war veteran, who meets manic drummer Hamilton Chance, whose ambition is to distill tax-free whiskey like his ancestors. The two join forces and set up their moonshining operation in the hills of Moses Coulee, only to be disrupted by a string of strange and mysterious characters. 

The landscape plays a more significant role than just backdrop, Dunn said. Chance, the fervent freedom-loving distiller, draws inspiration from a story about Chief Moses. 

“He (Chance) goes down to the Columbia River, and he's depressed by the water being all dammed up, but he was once told a story about the way Chief Moses, would always show up late. He had a flare for the dramatic, and he would grab a hold of his horse upstream and they would swim across the river to meet with whatever group of people were supposed to meet there. So he was always last and made a dramatic entrance.” 

Dunn grew up in Pittsburgh, but his wife is a Northwester and lived for a time in the Palisades area, he said. That’s how he came to discover Moses Coulee, driving up Palisades Road to see a place she had lived briefly as a teenager. 

“We turn and we start driving down the road,” he said. “And the best way I can describe it, (with) the basalt and the cliffs, there's a little strip of land. It's got some farms, some orchards but for the most part, it's a fairly forbidding place …  I was just starting on this buddy novel, and I needed a place. I said, ‘If these two morons in this book are going tax free whiskey, where could you go and no one would know you were there?’ And bingo.” 

Dunn and his wife raised their family in Spokane, he said, but the Moses Lake area was their favorite place to go for vacations, staying in town or at MarDon Resort and fishing the lakes in the area. 

“There's a vibrancy in Moses Lake,” he said. “The traffic is always rolling; whether it's agricultural trucks or whatever it is, there's a lot of movement and people action. You can just feel it.” 

Dunn has two other novels under his belt already, according to his website. “Radio Free Olympia” deals with a pirate radio operator in the rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula, and “Wildcat” is a romance set in the Rust Belt of Appalachia, where Dunn was born. He also published a collection of short stories and a book of poetry, both of which focus on the Inland Northwest. 

“Except for one book, they're all Washington state books,” he said. “I didn't grow up here, but this is where I wish I would have been born.”