 | A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN Michael Boyette
***Rights Available***
Genre: Non-Fiction |
When Lyle Federman came to the remote mountain town of Tehachapi, California, he believed that he’d left behind the compromises of modern society to live in harmony with the natural world. An Orthodox Jew who had become disillusioned with his Lubavitch community, Lyle was a self-employed computer programmer, able to work wherever he had his computer and a phone line. He and his ten-year-old son Eli settled into a small cabin in the forested foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. Lyle home-schooled Eli, and together they roamed the forests, hunting game, camping under the stars and dreaming of eventually finding a place even more remote and pure.
Somehow, though, the people of Tehachapi saw something sinister. Lyle’s neighbors never saw him go to work, and wondered how he made enough money to live. They watched from their windows as visitors from Los Angeles drove up and down the canyon road. A few of them concluded that he had to be up to no good. Based on nothing more than vague unease, they surmised that he was a Los Angeles drug dealer hiding out. Though Lyle had never done drugs, never been arrested, never gotten so much as a parking ticket, they convinced the local sheriff’s office that Lyle Federman was a dangerous and violent man who had to be watched.
The sheriff’s office began to keep an eye on Lyle, intercepting his mail, watching his bank account, coming to his house to question him about his activities. They never found him breaking the law. But one day they came knocking and Lyle wouldn’t let them in.
By the end of that day, Lyle Federman was dead—shot to death in his own living room, his body dragged into the dust of his front yard, and the Sheriff’s department characterizing him as a psychotic drug addict who’d left them no choice but to shoot. There was only one problem with the Sheriff’s story: It was nothing but lies.
But in spinning its web of lies, the Sheriff’s department didn’t account for one thing: Lyle’s wife, Chedva. While living separately, they remained married and very much in love. Chedva Federman could not believe the things the sheriff insisted her husband had done and, through eight years of careful detective work worthy of any of fiction’s amateur sleuths, Chedva untangled their web and found the truth. Justice, unfortunately, is not the same as truth. This book will do what no court has done: it will show the world how a small-town sheriff’s department murdered a man in cold blood. A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN unfolds like a crime novel, with dark deeds, hidden motives, fabricated evidence, and an official conspiracy. |
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| British Rights: | The Zack Company, Inc. | | Translation Rights: | The Zack Company, Inc. | | Audio Rights: | The Zack Company, Inc. | | Film & TV Rights: | The Zack Company, Inc. | | Rights Sold: | |
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The Zack Company, Inc.
