In Hard Coal Country

About the Book

As a police captain closing in on retirement in Chicago, Tom Nolan had no regrets about his life. Lisa, his wife, was a successful psychologist, and his son, Kevin, had recently graduated from the police academy and was a rookie in another precinct in the city. Mary, Tom's mother who had raised him as a single parent, lived with the family in a fashionable town house. But when Tom accompanied his mother to the funeral of her best friend in a small town in the anthracite region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, his comfortable existence came to an abrupt end.

Events that had taken place decades earlier in and around the bustling coal-mining town of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania were disclosed to Tom Nolan and forever changed the lives of all the members of the Nolan family.

About the Author

It is a well-documented fact that a fiction writer's life experiences enhance the plots and characters that he or she creates. Kerry Deminski is a man who worked as a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service for three and a half decades, but also spent a lot of time before and during that period holding down other jobs as well. He worked as an armed guard for a detective agency, as a truck driver for a bookbinder, as a janitor, as a heating and air conditioning mechanic, as a theater usher, as a convenience store clerk, as a factory laborer. While still a teenager in Appalachia, he spent three years working after high school and on weekends for an uncle in the trucking business, shoveling coal and shouldering heavy blocks of ice into hundreds of homes in that financially-depressed region. During these jobs, and others not mentioned, Deminski filed away in his mind all of the people he met and the things they said and did, hoping to draw upon these experiences to enrich the books he knew he would write someday. Now that someday has arrived, and the prolific author turns out one, sometimes two, novels every year. Kerry Deminski has also received royalties for song lyrics he has written; he has sold humor to Playboy Magazine; he has been granted U.S. Patent Numbers 5,755,438 and 5,788,706 for two of his inventions.