Mystery
Date Published: Aug 1, 2025
Narrator: Greg O'Donahue
Run Time: 6 hours 24 minutes
Guy Hogan and his wife planned to share their dream home in Colorado but cancer his took her from him. The mountains became his refuge and each day he hoped the next cast of his flyrod will chase away his loneliness.
Then he finds a man’s body in his favorite trout stream.
Learning why the man died becomes a quest to fill his emptiness. Hogan befriends a young woman as empty as he. Their path leads to a ring of poachers killing elk for their antlers, a break neck car chase across the twist and turns of the highest paved road in the United States, and the fury of a mountain flash flood.
But the young woman is not what she seems. Will her deadly secrets force Hogan to become the very thing he despises? The challenge is as treacherous as Trail ridge Road.
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Ornery Owl's Review
Four out of Five Stars
Readers/listeners who like a story with a hardened, world-weary male protagonist will enjoy this book. The writing style is punchy and the chapters are brief. There are plenty of twists and turns to keep audiences guessing. Betrayals and potential death wait around every corner.
I liked the protagonist, Guy Hogan, well enough. The POV shifts throughout the book might be a turnoff for some readers, but I actually liked the shift from first person to an omniscient third person narrator. It added clarity to the narrative.
What I did not like was the unfortunately fairly standard treatment of a heavyset, demotivated young waitress in a small restaurant. There is a scene where Willow, the damsel in distress, tells the young woman that she wears a size small T-shirt, because of course she does. Heaven forfend that she might wear a medium, and the possibility of her wearing a large is beyond the pale.
The scene could have left off at Willow getting her size small T-shirt, taking it into the ladies' room, and changing into it. However, the heavyset waitress had to play her role as a bad example because fat is the worst thing a person, especially a woman, can be.
This scene could have been used to reveal pettiness and vanity in Willow's nature, having Willow think to herself that the waitress probably hadn't worn a size small T-shirt in years. However, this statement about the waitress was part of the narrative, rendering it both useless and unnecessary. I would have given the story a five-star rating if not for the tired Fat People Are Only Useful As The Butt of Jokes stereotype.
I honestly didn't like Willow very much. In fact, most of the female characters in this story are odious. However, so are several of the male characters.
Audiences should be aware that there are brief scenes describing animal cruelty. The story is appropriate for adult audiences only.
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