The Smaller Thing: A Wild Places Wilderness Thriller
A guided week in the Quebec backcountry, in a place with one road in.
The same guide. The same February week. The same mountain.
Five years ago a woman went up with him and did not come down.
Travel journalist Claire Oakes has ten thousand words to write about Willa Tanner, thirty-four, whose death was searched, documented and closed. Nothing in the report is wrong. That is the thing that is wrong with it.
On Claire's first morning on the mountain, a man goes out at first light and dies on a slope he was told was safe. By evening the only road out is under three hundred metres of avalanche debris and the police are not coming. Six of them will have to walk out over the height of land: three days, two huts, no way back, and the man picking the ground is the one she has been trying to warn them about.
So she says it. Out loud, in English, through a translator, to people who are kind to her. And what arrives at the other end is always a size smaller than what she said.
This is not a thriller where the truth arrives as a verdict. It arrives as one word, said badly, in front of the right person.
Book Two of Wild Places, and it stands alone. The case closes inside this book, though not in a courtroom. What does not close is the editor who sent her there, the one she has never met.
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