Who’s up for a horror movie, western style? The story begins when an older man is found dead in his half-burned cabin, with a hole in his head and an empty bottle of liquor beside him. When Cody Hoyt arrives on scene, he immediately smells a fish. The deceased was his AA sponsor — and oddly, the man’s AA coins, proving decades’ worth of sobriety, have been taken. While the sheriff was eager to nail this an accidental death — the old man fell off the wagon, accidentally set fire to his cabin by overstuffing the furnace, end of story — the discovery of a hole in the deceased’s head leads to more investigation by Cody. Or it will, after Cody’s goes on a serious bender in grief and then climbs back out of the hole. A computer in the crime scene gives Cody a hint: either the old man or whoever killed him was researching a multiday horseback trek into Yellowstone. Cody, despite being suspended for certain actions undertaken during the bender that included shooting the coroner decides to investigate — and eneroute, he gains added motivation when he learns his son is on this particular trip. The result is a slow-burning psychological thriller as multiple people are interested in this particular trek into the park — and for very different reasons than to breath the clean air of the west and bond with a horse.
Take a distressed man with substance abuse problems, put his son in mortal danger, and then let some unknown party try to kill the man when he’s enroute to try to rescue his son and find out who killed his mentor. Add financial stress from having to pay a guide for his local knowledge and horses, mix with chronic danger from grizzly bears and wolves, and then throw in dollops of running into escaoed horses and murdered bodies as the man moves further into the park, suffering all the while from alcohol and cigarette withdrawal. Things are scarcely better when we move away from Cody’s perspective, as we focus on some teenagers who are scared as hell — scared of the park that their parents are making them visit, scared some of the strange people traveling in the group party, and scared of the pack leader who keeps making strange deviations from their published and agreed-upon itinerary. Then it gets worse, because people disappear every night — and the teenage girls’ father is distracted by his new girlfriend and must surely win the reward for Awful Father of the Year. When they tell him they think someone was spying on them when they tried to use the restroom, he laughs it off and tells them it was just a squirrel or something. Excuse me, but squirrels don’t laugh and leave size 11 boot prints in the dirt, Dad .
This was a very effective thriller, far more interesting than I expected at first: a routine murder investigation turns into a chaotic chase through a dangerous wilderness, filled with lethal critters and people with hidden motives and a willingness to commit desperate violence. Box somehow makes Cody sympathetic despite how deeply flawed a character he is, and I was surprised that the teenage sisters from the Highway quartet appeared here, too: I’d assumed they were one-offs, but they’re part of the action. Little Gracie even gets to stab someone! She wins “What did you do this summer” come fall, for sure.
Quotations:
When Cody looked out over the vista of green carpeted saddle slopes with tree-choked river valleys, massive red-veined geological upthrusts that bordered the eastern horizon until they gave up and became mountains, and the vast sprawling tableau of Yellowstone Lake miles ahead and below them, he said, “What big country.”
Mitchell grunted and reached back into a saddlebag for his binoculars. “Don’t fall in love with it,” Mitchell said. “It’s guaranteed to break your heart.”Mitchell clucked his tongue and his horse stepped out. He said, “I’m not sure I’m getting paid enough money to come out here into the wilderness with a desperate man withdrawing from alcohol AND cigarettes.”
“Please shut up,” Cody said.“I haven’t had a drink in days and I smoked my last cigarette two hours ago. All I want is an excuse to kill you five times over and piss on your remains. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, it’s you. The man who shot our coroner.”
It seemed like ages ago, Cody thought. “Yes, well, there’s a good story that goes along with that but I’ll need to tell you at a better time.”
Reading Freely 