What a welcome to a new community! Returning stateside after working in southern British Columbia, wildlife biologist Alex Carter arrives in The Town of Bellamy Falls in the state of Washington and is happy to meet up with Ben Hathaway, the coordinator for the Land Trust Conservation Association. Would Alex consider another field assignment?
Ben soon pulls out a fuzzy photo of a dark brown animal that had been taken by a remote camera on the Selkirk Wildlife Preserve. Is Alex game to take on this lonely assignment of staying by herself in an old house on the preserve to see if this could really be a mountain caribou, an elusive animal that has been de facto extinct in the United States? Darn right, she is!
As Alex goes into town to get some groceries and supplies, she is excited by the project she is on, but hearing about the finding of a dead body is a bit disconcerting, especially as she is so far from anyone. Alex is keen to get on with her task in the forest, but soon some things seem off. Why does she feel like someone is watching when she checks the remote equipment?
A GHOST OF CARIBOU by well-known wildlife thriller writer Alice Henderson is the third suspense book in her Alex Carter series. With an impressive background as a writer, wildlife researcher, and bio-acoustician, Henderson brings an authentic voice and sense of time and place to the important but often lonely work done by Alex and her friends as they do their monitoring activities.
I have to admit I was utterly captivated by A GHOST OF CARIBOU right from the first page to the last. I fully appreciate how well Henderson captures that small-town feel and the characters are realistic in their actions and opinions. Many of the characters are strong women who know how to do their jobs and so are able to handle most situations with their technical knowledge and “can-do” attitudes, but lots of suspense and danger when that is not the case!
I particularly relished the scene where Alex encounters the wonderful creature she had been seeking. She fully captured that feeling of awe! On a personal note, I was once driving in the mountains in southern British Columbia very late at night when I had to stop my car as a migration of a herd of mountain caribou moved quietly down the mountainside and just silently surrounded, then passed my stopped car, while the steam from their nostrils made for a very almost ghostly appearance in the dark night. That was well over 30 years ago, but the feeling of awe I experienced in seeing this almost ghostly-looking herd remains fresh in my mind.
All in all, I am sure both thriller and wildlife fans will find lots of exciting and riveting reading ahead for them in A GHOST OF CARIBOU! The murders are strange, the lights scary, and who knows what else goes on in the woods!
When a remote camera on a large, rugged expanse held by the Land Trust for Wildlife Conservation picks up a blurry image of what could be a mountain caribou, they contact Alex Carter to investigate. After all, mountain caribou went extinct in the contiguous U.S. years ago, and if one has wandered down from Canada, it’s monumental.
But when Alex arrives on scene in the Selkirk mountains of northeastern Washington state, she quickly learns that her only challenge isn’t finding an elusive caribou on a massive piece of land. The nearby townspeople are agitated; loggers and activists clash over a swath of old growth forest marked for clearcutting. The murdered body of a forest ranger is found strung up in the town’s park, and Alex learns of a backcountry hiker who went missing in the same area the year before.
As she ventures into the forest in search of the endangered animal, she quickly finds herself in a fight for her life, caught between factions warring for the future of the forest and a murderer stalking the dense groves of ancient trees.
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