In the trendy college town of Asheville, known as the "Paris of the South", hippies and hipsters ride a booming economy and huge influx of tourism, but when a wealthy young scion smashes into an embankment at 140 miles per hour, Mack Eagan, former junior-high football coach now turned private detective, is called to investigate. While the police assume the boy was drunk or on drugs, Mack learns there's more at play -- the legacy of a family tragedy, the fate of a dying child, and some dark and unpleasant truths about the people hiding behind the secrets. "To the Metal" is a story about love and loss, about growing up and growing old -- and about those who don't get to do either because death comes before their time. It's a mystery, a revenge story, and a tale of secret lives.Excerpts from "To the Metal": "This was backwoods country not too long ago, full of hillbillies and moonshiners and good old-fashioned mountain folk. Then George Vanderbilt came along in the late 1800s, fell in love with the place and decided to buy a trainload of it. The result was The Biltmore, still America's largest residence despite the efforts of celebrity billionaires ever since to unseat it. With its own Versailles, Asheville became known as the Paris of the South and a gem of the Gilded Age, but the Depression came along and ruined the party. Saddled with more per capita municipal debt than any city in the U.S., it didn't finish paying it off until the 70's. As a result, the city went into a steep decline and for decades had a downtown so dead no one bothered to tear any of it down. Which turned out to be a blessing as Asheville is now a veritable treasure trove of classic art-deco architecture. The Vanderbilts never left and that Grand Old Dame, the Biltmore, added a winery and opened its doors to the PBS-tote carrying crowd willing to pay whatever it costs to rub elbows with American royalty. The town's wedged into a 35-mile-wide valley surrounded by mountains and National Forest so there's nowhere for it to grow. The tight quarters have given it an odd schism, as it landed on Money Magazine's Best Places to Retire list at the same time Rolling Stone proclaimed it the "New Freak Capital of the U.S." It's a college town, UNCA and Warren Wilson College are here, both heralded for their "modern and innovative thinking", but if you ask me, the most popular majors seem to be Making Useless Things Out of Stained Glass, Ceramics That'll Never Sell and How To Draw Faeries II, III and IV. Last year, Lonely Planet named it the "Top U.S. Travel Destination", beating out both NYC and LA, incidentally, and it's a good thing, too, as the freaks may be an entertaining lot but they suffer from a severe case of un-, under- and anti-employment. Thus, the hippies & hipsters, hikers & bikers, brewers & farmers and writers & artists all dance along the poverty line while tourists and retirees watch them with amused detachment from the city's generous complement of five-star restaurants, an arrangement that seems to work out fine for both sides. For now, anyway. Maybe one day there'll be another French revolution, but only if they figure out how to make Molotov cocktails out of biofuel."

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