Blood Knots is a brilliant and dramatic memoir of an angler’s life. It places Jennings in the front rank of natural history writers. As a child in the 1960s, he was fascinated by the rivers and lakes around his home. Beneath their surfaces waited alien and mysterious worlds. With library books as his guide, he applied himself to the task of learning to fish. His progress was slow, and for years, he caught nothing. But then a series of teachers presented themselves, including an inspirational young intelligence officer, from whom he learned stealth, deception, and the art of dry-fly fishing. So began an enlightening but often dark-shadowed journey of discovery. It would lead to bright streams and wild country, but would end with his mentor’s capture, torture, and execution by the IRA. Blood Knots is about angling, about great fish caught and lost, but it is also about friendship, honor, and coming of age. As an adult, Jennings has sought out lost and secretive waterways, probing waters at dead of night in search of giant pike. The quest, as always, is for more than the living quarry. For only by searching far beneath the surface, he suggests in this most moving and thought-provoking of memoirs, can you connect with your own deep history. Jennings offers here a striking, elegiac narrative for lovers of unique memoirs and the finest fly-fishing literature.

Blood Knot is a parable of two brothers who share a one-room shack near Port Elizabeth, South Africa: Zachariah is dark-skinned and Morris, light-skinned. They share the same mother but find their differences lead them to a common bond as brothers and men. Saving to buy a farm where they may retire Morris is the "slave", cooking and cleaning while Zach earns money for them both. When Morrie joins a lonely hearts club on his brother's behalf, they find themselves awaiting the visit of a White woman who will never arrive.

The last thing The Dog wanted was to find another body. But there was Annie Adams - the barn lady - floating dead at his feet, her easel and paints set up on the bridge above his head. And so The Dog wades his way through Kussmaul country encountering a confessing nine year old, a dispute over trespassing, a shunned Amish woman, and a quite possibly rabid beaver. And The Dog knows, this is not a fishing trip.

With Blood Knot, award-winning author Pete Fromm confirms his place as one of the outstanding literary talents mining the natural world. In this powerful collection, he lures startling drama from seemingly still surfaces with ten of his finest fishing stories: a wedding in the ice-cold rush of a Montana river symbolizes the promise and fear of marriage, a young 'hood' shows his true colors when he takes his girlfriend's little brother out fishing for muskie, and an eight-year-old boy is moved cross-country, away from his father, only to practice knots on the bedpost in anticipation of their reunion and return to the river. Peter Fromm's tales bond his characters not only to each other but also to nature and the bittersweet truth of their very existence. Although the fish range from the smallest beaver-pond brook trout to the hulking, invisible paddlefish, in the end it's the people - as varied and vulnerable as the fish they pursue - who will draw you into their lives and hold on to a piece of you long after the stories end.

The brothers of Blood Knot-- one dark-skinned, one light-- betray their dreams of a better future with the impossible wish of passing for white. In Hello and Goodbye, a poor white brother and sister churn their once-promising past to comprehend their bleak present. Boesman and Lena, a black husband and wife, tramp homelessly through a severe and unforgiving landscape, discovering strength and recovering devotion through an encounter with a mysterious old African.

Now in paperback. Originally published 2006 - the second fly fishing mystery set in Wisconsin

THE LAST RESORT North Country Academy is where desperate parents send their troubled teenagers when all else has failed. For remote Trout Run, New York, the school means good jobs, always scarce in the Adirondacks. But to Police Chief Frank Bennett, the Academy -- with its roster of delinquent students and its unlikable but curiously compelling headmaster, MacArthur Payne -- means an open invitation to trouble. When a teacher leading a survivalist wilderness expedition is mauled by a bear, evidence points to sabotage. As Frank's investigation leads him behind the gated walls of Payne's institution, he finds a place that is more prison than school. Under political pressure to keep the school open at all costs, Frank risks his career and his life to unravel a knot of old scores and new rivalries...before they turn deadly.