High Andes

About the Book

Will Wylie and his daughter make it out alive?

Wylie Cypher, a corporate attorney, has a dying marriage, a midlife crisis, and is disillusioned with his work. Trying to regain fading youth, he plans a trekking vacation with his daughter, Mercy, across the White Mountains of Peru.

When he arrives in Lima a young law student mistakenly believes Wylie is an agent of the US government and gives him a travel guide concealing documents that show how the government is torturing and murdering dissidents. Wylie decides to deliver those documents to US authorities, which will affect the outcome of the civil war raging in Peru at the time.

Peruvian government thugs and agents of the Shining Path communist guerrilla movement are quickly on Wylie's trail, both eager to kill Wylie and his entire trekking party. Wylie, his daughter, a local guide, and his friend, an archeologist (who is more than he seems), and porters set out using various ruses to throw their pursuers off track.

Wylie narrowly escapes from the local police after being tortured and losing a toe. But can they cross the foreboding eighteen thousand foot high pass and make it to Cajamarca in time to take the only safe flight home and deliver the documents?

About the Author: The author of Public Information has had a varied career. He has been a scrub nurse in an operating room, a professional photographer, a soldier during the Korean War, a correspondent for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, an attorney specializing in international corporate law, a manager of large and small businesses and, lately, an author and Master Gardener. His first book, Public Information, tells the story of Wylie Cypher, a hapless young soldier who arrives in Korea in the midst of bloody combat. Wylie manages to survive his sixteen-month tour of duty as Margenau recounts in gory, ribald, poignant and accurate detail. His adventures are recounted in military jargon and his sometimes abrasive involvement with the "Army way" describes the good, bad and incredible of life in the military. Along the way, Wylie manages to find and lose love. Pistils and Poetry is the author's second book. It is a compilation of favorite Elizabethan poems (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, and numerous others) juxtaposed with the author's photographs of flowers. The book is considered as an elegant way to tease reluctant poetry readers into an appreciation of the beautiful sentiments and language of long ago masters of the English language. Encouraged by the reception for his first novel, Margenau published Master Gardener, his second novel, in March 2013. It is a story that explores conflicts between the benefits of engineered crops and their potential for ecological disaster. Wylie Cypher, the hero of Public Information, is now seventy-five years old. He uses his life and legal experience to defend one of the women in his life, Anne Proctor, against the machinations of malevolent BIG AG. Senior citizens band together as eco-terrorists to save the monarch butterfly, and Dick Geier, the ruthless and profane CEO of BIG AG, engages in corporate shenanigans that reflect current headlines. The story is set in Middletown, New Anglia, not too far from Philadelphia, and episodes along the Amazon River in Peru bracketed by episodes along the Amazon River in Peru.. His third novel, published in August 2014, is High Andes. Rolf Margenau lives in rural New Jersey with his wife, three dogs, and a flower garden favored by monarch butterflies. He is now working on his fourth novel. Tentatively titled National Parks, the story recounts what happens, in the near future, when Congress decides to nationalize America's National Parks.