SNOWBOUND SIX

Richard Martin Stern, author of The Tower (filmed as The Towering Inferno), is not to be confused with Richard G. Stern, author of Golk and Other Men's Daughters, and a stylist of a much higher order. The present Snowbound is a competent adventure tale about a Search and Rescue team in the Rockies and a snowbound family that the team's trying to rescue. Warner Harlow, a former football star, has brought his family along in a trailer on a trip to New Mexico for an elk shoot. Ten thousand feet up a mountain, his trailer jackknifes and turns over the car. The stranded family is led by a passing backpacker to a cave where they hope to wait out a snowstorm. A twisted ankle, a heart attack, a swipe from a bear, and a minor avalanche that closes up the cave add to the difficulties of man versus nature. Meanwhile a plane crashes nearby, and a dead state senator is left hanging in the overturned craft while his sub rosa inamorata is rescued by the backpacker. Down below, the Search and Rescue team sets out to locate the lost senator and runs into its own dangers. Philosophically, the novel is out to do the ""No man is an island"" bit, with the deep danger opening people up to each other--otherwise this is not an ambitious book.