Sandvox Website Profile: “Dana Hand”

Deep Creek is a historical novel inspired by actual events and people: the 1887 massacre of Chinese miners in remote, wild Hells Canyon, the middle-aged judge who went after their slayers, and the sham race-murder trial that followed, thanks to the opposition and indifference of area citizens. This American tragedy was long suppressed and the victims nearly forgotten; Deep Creek teams fact and imagination to illuminate how and why.

Readers 18-88, especially those interested in history, the Pacific Northwest, true-crime fiction, investigation and police procedures, and vivid, gripping action and characters.

"Deep Creek is a vivid, scary, beautiful exploration of a dark moment in American history, all but forgotten, now brought explosively to life."

— Richard Preston, author of Hot Zone and The Wild Trees

We hope that visitors to the site will buy the book, read it, and discuss it with friends. We have provided three downloadable guides for reading groups, whether they are friends or members of school classes.

We are especially pleased that installing Google Analytics allows us to see hits on the site from as far away as Europe, New Zealand, and China. That's especially gratifying, as the novel narrates a violent episode in Chinese-American history that was suppressed for many years.

Our site is what designers call a brochure; it provides information in a compact form. For that reason, we chose the Neo-News design, but modified it with a banner and kept the page form tight, to fit on laptop screens. The design is flexible enough to allow us to add on future book and film titles, as they appear.

The Quicktime video was our most ambitious page. We built the film in Keynote and experimented with saving it in various formats until we had one that loads quickly and auto-plays. The film runs over four minutes, and it's the biggest single reason that Google Analytics reports page visits that average over ten minutes.