ZIPLINE

A group of young people face a mountain of danger in Michael’s thriller.

A young woman named Gail and her best friend, Danny, make a risky decision. For all of their lives, Gail’s Uncle Perkins has been telling “some doozies of tall tales” about the perils of nearby Finch Mountain (“He told me stories of this place before I went to bed, which kept me up at night with the lights on”). In response, Gail and Danny have decided that, on the cusp of beginning their adult-life jobs, they’re going to investigate those stories by exploring Finch Mountain—though they promise Uncle Perkins they’ll stay in the foothills. In grand thriller tradition, they’re fibbing; they intend to get together with Gail’s friend Neal; Danny’s girlfriend, Paula; and their goofy friend Sam (derided by Gail as an “immature weed head”) to scale the mountain, reassure themselves that there are no bogeymen up there, and then take a zip line back down. They haven’t been hiking long before things start to happen that make them wonder if all those stories from Uncle Perkins might have been true after all. The author conveys all of this with an energy that belies the fact that it’s all been written many, many times before. Readers may roll their eyes at the ridiculous horror-thriller contrivances (the group decides to leave most of their cellphones behind; they shrug off a destroyed campsite as no big deal), but they’ll appreciate the sheer gusto Michael brings to the tale. His characters are straight out of central casting: the take-charge alpha guy, the sarcastic girlfriend, the stoner nobody believes when he’s the first to spot trouble, and so on, but some of the twists that occur as the story spirals to its climax will catch even seasoned thriller readers by surprise. Those readers will likely wish Michael had developed this brief story into a longer novel.

A taut and effective (if familiar) thriller about an unknown menace among the peaks.