By: Dar Dowling
The most interesting thing in K. Eric Crook’s author biography is not the forest management degree or the master’s in city and regional planning or the years of professional experience in technical writing, though all of those matter for the novel he has written. The most interesting thing is his stated philosophy of verisimilitude, his belief that a story that sounds like the truth is compelling to read and a joy to write. That philosophy is not a casual observation. It is the organizing principle of a creative sensibility that has produced technical documents including the concept plan for the Second Avenue subway for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and that now, in Between a Rock, produces a wilderness thriller that sounds like the truth from the very first page and never sounds like anything else.
The Adirondacks that Crook has built in this novel are a specific and demanding place, rendered with the kind of detail that only comes from genuine familiarity with how wilderness terrain actually shapes the movement and the choices of the people working within it. When the Department of Environmental Conservation’s resources are stretched thin by the simultaneous demands of a murder investigation and the need to protect the hikers and campers who are sharing the landscape with the criminals being hunted, that tension is rendered with the specificity of someone who understands what those resources actually consist of and what the specific geography of the Adirondacks actually demands of the people managing it. The cliffs above Avalanche Lake are not generic thriller scenery. They are a specific place with specific dangers and a specific relationship to the institutional systems designed to manage human activity within them.
Stacy, the first woman named crew chief in the Adirondacks, is the novel’s most fully realized character, and Crook handles her position with the care of someone who understands that being first is not a single dramatic accomplishment but a continuous daily negotiation with an institutional environment that was not built with your presence in mind. Her leadership of a team whose competitive natures require active management under the pressure of an unfolding crisis is rendered with the kind of procedural intelligence that comes from Crook’s own experience navigating complex institutional environments. Wayne, the newcomer from Montana who uncovers the evidence of murder that sets the full investigation in motion, brings an outsider’s fresh perception to a landscape and an institutional culture that have their own established rhythms and their own established hierarchies, and his gradual integration into the team is one of the novel’s most quietly satisfying threads.
The crime plot itself, connecting the apparent accident at Avalanche Lake to a bank robbery and a murder through a web of relationships and motivations that gradually reveals itself, is constructed with the architectural intelligence that Crook’s background in planning naturally produces. The revelations are carefully sequenced, the constraints on the investigation are specific and genuine, and the resolution satisfies because it has been built toward rather than imposed.
Between a Rock is a genuinely original entry in the wilderness thriller genre, grounded in expertise and executed with craft, and The Gansted Trilogy it launches has every reason to become a significant series for readers who want their crime fiction to earn its authenticity.
If you want a thriller that sounds like the truth because it was written by someone who knows the territory it describes from the inside out, Between a Rock by K. Eric Crook is the book that delivers that quality on every page. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today, and discover what happens when a forest management degree and a commitment to verisimilitude combine to produce one of the most authentically grounded wilderness thrillers currently available.
