Beneath the Smoke

Rose Grady, a ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, literally stumbles across the mangled remains of a lone female backpacker. Although the slashed tent and partially eaten body point to bears being responsible, Rose’s intuition doesn’t like that conclusion, especially when the woman’s autopsy shows that she had also been sexually assaulted. After talking to Benjamin McClure, the specialist in charge of backcountry permits, who is in the perfect position to know when single women go backpacking, she gets suspicious and confides in her boss, Henry Bare. However, Henry tells her to keep her nose out of the official investigation, even after a second woman is killed in the same way and the same area.

Despite her anger and resentment, Rose tries to lose herself in her duties and her social life, but cannot get the killings out of her mind. Gradually by keeping her eyes and ears open, she realizes that Benjamin may not be such a clear-cut choice for the killer after all as other suspects surface in her clandestine investigation. Finally fear replaces other emotions as Rose also comes to the realization that the killings may not be over with. A bear-like creature that now seems to be stalking her and the “accidents” that suddenly seem to be happening to her and her friends might be indications that she’s getting too close to the truth. If she can’t determine who – or what – is responsible for the backcountry slayings in time, she herself could become the third mangled victim.

(The author apologizes in advance for any formatting errors that have crept in when this file was converted from the Word doc to the Kindle format.)