Wyoming woods chilling in Gardner’s thriller

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This article was published 23/04/2022 (1593 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Five buddies went camping in the Wyoming wilderness to celebrate their charismatic leader’s imminent marriage — but he disappeared, never to be seen again.

Not a clue did a massive search-and-rescue effort find — no body, no DNA, no animal-ravaged corpse, no clothing, no backpack, no broken trail. All very mysterious, which is what you’d want in a mystery novel.

And every year in the five years since, his obsessed and devastated father leads a search party ever deeper into the wilderness to find any trace of his remains, amid terrifying tales of marauding bears, big hungry cats, bottomless canyons, half a dozen vanished hikers, weird screams in the night, even — shudder — Bigfoot. (Even though everyone knows sasquatch live in the Pacific northwest and are herbivores.)

Stepping off a bus in the middle of nowhere is Frankie Elkin — 40ish drifter, alcoholic, loner, a woman beset by demons, who roams the U.S. searching for cold case missing persons, finding lost people when no one else can, though only rarely still alive.

We met Frankie in American mystery author Lisa Gardner’s magnificent 2021 novel Before She Disappeared.

Is the urban dweller prepared for mountainous wilderness? Can Frankie possibly explain what grabs her about this case among the tens of thousands of disappeared Americans? What compelled her to get off a bus in Wyoming? How can she possibly convince the grieving father to let her join his annual mad expedition?

Spoiler alert on that last one — Frankie joins the search.

The four former groomsmen are there, along with a local tracker seemingly carved from the granite of the mountains, a gentle red giant who’s a professional Bigfoot hunter and a young woman with her dog which is trained to find cadavers. Looming over them all is the infinite sorrow of the missing man’s mother, back home dying of cancer, the father having vowed to bring home their son while she yet lives.

We learn things — about how cadaver dogs work, how searches are conducted, about how many hikers astonishingly go missing in the U.S. every year, about how Bigfoot hunters compile the best stats on those areas in which people have disappeared. We’ll pause while assignment editors give that last one to an intern to check out.

Gardner describes herself as an avid hiker who loves the outdoors, but look — if you’re a city person who thinks Birds Hill Park is more nature than you can handle, One Step Too Far won’t persuade you to go outdoors. Nature can bite.

This is a superb mystery — for once, that cliché about being unable to turn pages fast enough is true.

Everyone lies. Everyone has secrets, some have Secrets, perhaps at least one searcher has Really Big Secrets.

You just know that something bad will happen, but when, and to whom… Gardner’s got us there. Will everyone who walks past the trailhead come back again? Not likely.

One Step Too Far has elements of Deliverance, and sure, you can point to the Agatha Christie template of diminishing supplies of posse members.

Lisa Gardner isn’t derivative. She’s terrific. If you go out in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin will continue to be an enthusiastic hiker, but will vastly broaden his definition of wilderness and the dragons who dwell therein.