Review: “North of Nowhere” Is a Thriller You’ll Read in One Night

Some thrillers grab you by the collar on page one. “North of Nowhere” waits about three pages, just long enough for you to settle in and get comfortable, and then it never lets go. Leo Park’s (fictional) thriller strands a search-and-rescue team in a blizzard with a secret among them. By the time the storm closes the only road out of the mountains, we had already canceled our evening plans, made a pot of coffee and accepted that sleep would have to wait. It is the most purely entertaining book we have read this year.

The setup

The story begins in the fictional town of Pike’s Hollow, a cluster of cabins and one diner tucked into the mountains of western Montana. When a pair of backcountry skiers goes missing during the first big storm of the season, the county’s volunteer search-and-rescue team heads out to find them. There are six members: a veteran team leader named Cal Mercer, a young paramedic, a former Army pilot, a local schoolteacher, a quiet ranch hand and Nora Quinn, a newcomer who joined the team only a few months earlier.

Within a day, the search goes badly wrong. A sudden whiteout traps the team in an old forest-service cabin miles from town, with their radios failing and the temperature dropping fast. Then they find something in the snow that suggests the missing skiers did not simply get lost. Someone in the cabin knows more than they are saying, and the storm is not going to wait for anyone to confess.