What do you do when your father leaves behind an unfinished novel—and your father happens to be one of the most beloved and prolific storytellers in American literature?
Do you finish it?
And if you do, how do you make it his story while also making it your own?
That's the fascinating challenge Beau L'Amour faced with Skyring Water, a new novel based on a partial manuscript by his late father, legendary author Louis L'Amour.
The story takes us to 1961, when the Cold War is reaching a dangerous point. The Berlin Wall is dividing East and West. Nuclear tensions are escalating. Empires are crumbling.
And then, in Barcelona, a rogue East German STASI officer sets off a chain of events involving struggling arms dealers, organized crime, intelligence agencies—and 30 tons of stolen gold hidden in an icebound wilderness at the end of the world.
At the center are Mike Fowler, a former Navy salvage diver and OSS assassin, and Anton Voss, an expatriate German scientist whose mysterious past becomes increasingly dangerous.
Once enemies, they've become inseparable friends.
But when Mike discovers Anton standing over a midnight visitor with a gun, everything changes.
Soon they're running from gangsters, the CIA, Israeli intelligence, and a mysterious organization intent on building an invisible empire.
The trail stretches from Marseille to Caracas to Patagonia—and eventually leads straight into Anton's Nazi past.
Today, I'm joined by Beau L'Amour to talk about Skyring Water, the extraordinary process of completing a story his father began, and what it means to collaborate with a writer who has been gone for years—but whose voice remains unmistakable.
