The Fourth Time: A Novel

By James Wenhwaurth

Five women. Six days off-grid. Only one has been here before.

Three weeks after her marriage ends by mis-sent text, wedding photographer Nora Halvorsen books a place on the WildHeart Reset: five days, five women, one radical return to yourself. The ad found her eleven times in four days. She never asks how the guide knows things about her she didn't put on the form.

Damien Calloway is warm, perceptive, and genuinely good at his job. That is the problem.

By the third day, Nora is photographing things she can't explain - a mark carved into a pine, a figure at the tree line, a rusted ranger box half a mile off a trail that isn't on any map. Inside it: a permit dated three years ago. Five names. All five marked DEPARTED.

Only one marked RETURNED.

And the quiet widow who has barely spoken since the trailhead finally tells Nora the truth: she was one of the five. She came back on purpose. And this is the fourth time.

The Fourth Time is a psychological thriller about coercive control, algorithmic targeting, and the terrible distance between being seen and being safe - for readers of Nine Perfect Strangers, The Hunting Party, and Behind Closed Doors.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HGX8J29R
• ISBN13: 9798170326013
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 327 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"