Wilderness Fiction

Every season in Rockton seems to bring a new challenge. At least that's what Detective Casey Duncan has felt since she decided to call this place home. Between all the secretive residents, the sometimes-hostile settlers outside, and the surrounding wilderness, there's always something to worry about. While on a much needed camping vacation with her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, Casey hears a baby crying in the woods. The sound leads them to a tragic scene: a woman buried under the snow, murdered, a baby still alive in her arms.

When her emotionally-abusive ex flees the country to escape arrest for blackmailing other politicians, it’s actually a relief—a chance to reclaim her life. But retreating to the mountain house gifted by her mother, she’s met by hostility from the nearby town. The locals blame Erin for her ex’s corrupt actions that led to the construction of a private prison, drawing gangs, violence, and death.

"Wilderness," a darkly intriguing short story first published as an e-book original, was written as prelude to Dean Koontz’s novel of mystery, suspense, and strange wonder - Innocence.

While on her way to Arizona to teach school, beautiful Margaret Earle suddenly finds herself lost in the wilderness. When a ragged man happens across her in the middle of the night, she believes help has arrived--but he turns out to be even more threatening than the wilderness, and Margaret runs from him in desperation. Lost once more, besieged by the elements, terrified by the howling of wild beasts around her, Margaret wonders how she will survive.

When a good deed leaves him stranded in Comanche territory, where his supplies and weapons are stolen, Nate King finds himself defenseless against a band of bloodthirsty warriors who want him dead. 

The King family wouldn't have lasted as long as they have in the remote, perilous Rockies if they didn't know a thing or two about survival. But even after all these years, the wilderness has a few surprises for them. There's something not quite right about a glacier high atop a peak near their valley. The Indians claim it’s bad medicine and won't go near it. Of course, that doesn't stop Louisa King from cajoling her husband to go on a getaway up to the high country. But something terrible lives on that glacier....

Charlie Bone has finally found his father, but he’s disappeared again - on a second honeymoon with Charlie’s mother. But there’s no time to miss them, for there’s a strange salty mist in the air, and chilling howls in the night. And someone has been searching Charlie’s house. What are they looking for? And could Dagbert, the new boy with pale lips and cold aquamarine eyes, have something to do with it?

After rescuing Solomon Cain from an Indian death trap, mountain man Nathanial King is left stranded by the ungrateful man in the wilderness, where he hooks up with a Ute brave who is determined to kill Cain.

The Cold Creek Highway stretches close to five hundred miles through British Columbia’s rugged wilderness to the west coast. Isolated and vast, it has become a prime hunting ground for predators. For decades, young women traveling the road have gone missing. Motorists and hitchhikers, those passing through or living in one of the small towns scattered along the region, have fallen prey time and again. And no killer or abductor who has stalked the highway has ever been brought to justice.

Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living. When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised.

Loving her adventurous life in the Rocky Mountains, Evelyn King joins her Nansusequa neighbors during a buffalo hunt only to find her party ambushed by a gang of scalp hunters who are cutting a violent swath toward New Mexico territory. 

Evelyn King longs to marry the man she loves. She won't let anything stand in her way. But the frontier is a dangerous place. Killers and hostiles and beasts abound. As Evelyn is reminded when she and her beloved become the prey of two-legged wolves—and something far worse.

Mountain man Nate King comes to the aid of his friends Simon and Felicity Ward when a ruthless Easterner lays claim to hundreds of square miles as his private hunting preserve, including their homestead. 

With murderous poachers targeting rare blue bear cubs, Alaska trooper Poppy Walsh and her K-9 partner, Stormy, will do whatever it takes to stop them. But having to team up with her ex-fiancé, park ranger Lex Fielding, will be Poppy’s biggest test. When the poachers go after Lex’s young son, can Poppy and Lex overcome their unresolved past…and survive a killer’s sights?

Legendary mountain man Shakespeare McNair has seen enough winters in the wilderness to know when something isn't right. And beneath the waters of the lake near his new home, something is definitely off. Nate King and his family can see it, too - waves without any wind to create them, a huge force that pulls a fishing pole right from Evelyn King's hands, something malevolent out there...watching them. Shakespeare knows it's just a matter of time before the creature hurts someone. But he's not going to wait around. He's going to go after it himself, even knowing he might not come back.

Robert Parker ventures into the vast unknown to study new species of plant and animals in the name of science. And he's thrilled when a young half-breed named Zach King invites him back to his secluded valley in the Rocky Mountains - a valley teeming with wildlife that no naturalist has ever explored. But Parker's about to find out he's not the only newcomer. 

Terpsichore can't wait to follow in Laura Ingalls Wilder's footsteps...now she just has to convince her mom. It's 1934, and times are tough for their family. To make a fresh start, Terpsichore’s father signs up for President Roosevelt's Palmer Colony project, uprooting them from Wisconsin to become pioneers in Alaska. Their new home is a bit of a shock - it's a town still under construction in the middle of the wilderness, where the residents live in tents and share a community outhouse. But Terpsichore’s not about to let first impressions get in the way of this grand adventure.

John Galsworthy's epic Forsyte Chronicles, a nine-volume series of novels dramatizing the fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes, has become established as one of the most popular and enduring works of 20th century literature. He made their lives and times, loves and losses so real that readers accused him of including real individuals whom they knew as the characters in his drama.

Is this journey’s end . . .or just the beginning?Toklo, Kallik, Lusa, and Ujurak have finally reached the Last Great Wilderness, the legendary bear paradise they’ve been searching for. But while his companions think they’ve come to the end of their long journey, Ujurak feels a deep unrest. Is this truly where they¹re meant to be?

A perfect afternoon soon descends into an outdoor fight for life when a cunning and vicious mountain lion relentlessly stalks Evelyn King and Dega through an unexplored valley.