Opening line: She was
not there.
The first paragraph of
this claustrophobic, taut tale takes us, paradoxically, to the wide-open Utah desert, where Silas
Pearson is searching for a missing woman. He knows his quest is likely hopeless. This
expanse of red sandstone may look flat but it is creased with crevices, some of
them hundreds of feet deep. An unwary hiker might break an ankle stumbling
across a narrow rift and die of heat exhaustion under the sun, or fall into
black depths and drown as the next rainstorm funnels through the gully. Yet
Silas keeps looking, obsessively mapping the terrain a few days each week,
marking off his search areas in 7.5 inch grid squares on the small-scale
topographical maps that paper his living room walls. He has done this, we
learn, for the past three-plus years, seeking his wife.
By the end of Chapter
One, I shared Silas’ obsession, drawn in by his close observation of the rock
itself, by his attention to every nuance of weather and geography that might
offer a clue to her end. My desire to learn his wife’s fate, and to understand the web of emotions
that drove his obsessive hunt, carried my eyes from sentence to sentence, page
to page, while the sere landscape built itself in my mind.
The Slickrock Paradox
takes us through terrain as unforgiving on the outside as Silas’ inner country
is to him. This is a novel for those who love wilderness as passionately as
they do a gripping, suspenseful mystery.
The Slickrock Paradox(2012)
#1 in The Red Rock
Canyon Mysteries
No comments:
Post a Comment