Cover: a small cabin at the edge of a treeline, one window lit red, beneath a vast black sky.

Three friends drive three miles up a private road to a cabin in the Maine woods. Only one of them is telling the truth.

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One is grieving. One needs to disappear. One has no idea what he is walking into. A storm closes the road behind them—and the stories they have told one another begin to come apart.

North of Bangor, a man named Wolfgang Taco is collecting one more napkin.

Crime thriller
18 chapters
Approx. 25,200 words
Adults 18+

Plate II

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Free opening · 4 minutes 36 seconds

One. Wolfgang Taco

A man alone in a motel room. A worn leather bag. Four hundred and sixteen napkins. Then the phone rings.

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Content note: The novel contains graphic violence, sexual violence, strong language, and disturbing imagery. It is intended for adults.

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Plate III

From the book

        One
        Wolfgang Taco collected napkins, and never his own.
      
        One
        Cotton was best. Cotton held a scent for years.
      
        Four
        He believed about half of the story. He had never once decided which half.
      
        Seven
        There were no neighbors. Erich had been coming to this cabin for eleven years and there had never once been a neighbor.
      
        Seven
        Nobody who wants a thing from a man kills his family first.

Plate IV

Four men

Plate i

Wolfgang Taco

A motel room north of Bangor. He keeps four hundred and sixteen of them, and he remembers the mouth of every man they came from.

Plate ii

Erich Fischer

Forty miles to the hospital with one hand on the wheel and one on the wound. He says the thing he has never said, because the only man he can say it to is unconscious.

Plate iii

Sean Malan

A powder tattoo from the night his brother died. He tells people it looks like Belfast. It is the only true thing he has said out loud in four months.

Plate iv

Tuck Sauer

He built the bar himself over one long winter and it is the only thing in his life he is unambiguously proud of. When his oldest friends arrive, he pours three.

Plate V

The authors

Christopher Jacobsen, Jonathan Palaima, Kersten Schweppe and Heinz Windzio have known each other a long time. Their houses back onto the same stretch of woods, and years ago they cut a trail from each of their yards to a clearing in the middle of it, so that they could meet there without having to use the road.

Most of what happened in that clearing is not in this book. Some of it is.

Small Cabin in a Big Country was conceived during a football game and written by four people who could not agree on the ending. It is their first novel.

Plate VI

Read or listen

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Edition 01

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Edition 02

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