Wilderness Fiction

Crystal Rainey is aghast when she realizes her New Year's resolutions haven't changed one whit from the previous year. Wanting to escape a future as dreary as a Pacific Northwest winter, she walks out on her dead-end office job, despite her tenuous savings account. Stumbling across a job opening posted by a wilderness guide outfit, an intrigued Crystal bluffs her way into the position. With her handsome fellow guide, the stalwart Conner Oakes, she leads a corporate retreat on a snowshoe hike to a majestic alpine chalet.

In How We Disappear, award-winning author Tara Lynn Masih offers listeners transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone—runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes.

Twenty-nine-year-old Holly Franklin had recently moved from Florida to Colorado. The move allowed Holly to work with her boyfriend Josh in the same branch office of the bank they’d worked for in Florida. Sooner or later, Holly knew Josh would propose. On a rare autumn weekday off, Holly decided to go for a four-hour hike in the mountains. The trail was a loop, and she would be home by afternoon. But Holly took a wrong turn and came to a dead end. Trying to cut across to the right trail, Holly got lost, and as the sun began to set, a snowstorm started.

When a floatplane mysteriously explodes above the Alaska wilderness, investigators begin digging into the lives of the five passengers and the pilot. Was the target of the bomb the US senator in the midst of a hotly contended reelection campaign or her husband, a corporate raider with no shortage of enemies? Or could the bomb have been meant for the cannery owner involved in a contentious divorce, or the refuge manager who had a long list of adversaries, including one who vowed to get even with him?

In the wilderness of discovering who you are and how you fit into the world, the most important lesson you'll learn is whether you're part of the pack or one of the prey.

When two men, recently discharged from the Air Force, set out for a hunting trip on Kodiak Island in Alaska, they expect the adventure of a lifetime. Instead, they find themselves embroiled in a never-ending nightmare. More than 40 years later, biologist Jane Marcus and her friends discover human remains near Karluk Lake in the middle of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.

Wilderness guide Crystal Rainey leads a group of college students to a private campground amid the awe-inspiring Olympic Rain Forest. The excursion is ruined when the charming hostess Roxie is discovered standing over the land owner's body, murder weapon in hand. Enlisted to investigate the crime to absolve her friend, Crystal descends on the quiet city of Forks to find loggers, developers, and eco-protesters circling the property, intent on either exploiting or protecting the bastion of old-growth forest.

A Fateful Flaw is a fictional tale set in the Judean wilderness immediately following the baptism of Jesus. Aided by the archangels Michael and Gabriel and other heavenly beings, God-now-man Jesus—shackled by time—grapples with human frailty and the sinister wiles of the devil. Whimsy and humor interlace pointed truths.

It's truffle season, and in the hills around Bologna the hunt is on for the legendary Boscuri White, worth more than its weight in gold. But when an American truffle 'supertaster' goes missing, English Detective Daniel Leicester discovers not all truffles are created equal. Did the missing supertaster bite off more than he could chew?