Under Tower Peak
A Tommy Smith High Country Noir, Book One
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4.1 • 11 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This tautly written debut thriller was named one of the 10 Best Mysteries of 2013 by the Wall Street Journal.
After two tours as a sniper in Iraq, Tommy Smith has returned to his former life as a cowboy and wilderness guide in California’s Sierra Nevada, hoping to reclaim the simplicity of his youth and heal the wounds the world can’t see. When, high on a mountain pass, he and his partner find the wrecked plane of a billionaire adventurer who disappeared months earlier, a seemingly innocent act triggers a breathtaking cycle of violence that threatens Tommy’s world. Soon he is enmeshed in the struggle between the billionaire’s trophy wife and wannabe drug lord son and their allies. Every effort to set things right draws him deeper into a bad situation and closer to needing those deadly skills that he had hoped to leave behind forever.
With lean, efficient prose and dialogue that crackles with repartee, Bart Paul has written a contemporary thriller of steadily mounting suspense and ruthless action. He captures both the beauty of the high mountain wilderness and the laconic rhythms of the outfitters’ lives. In Tommy Smith he offers a protagonist whose cool competence, home-grown decency, and clarity of purpose in the face of danger suggest a brotherhood with heroes from the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Paul's entertaining first novel, a western-flavored thriller, two wilderness guides, Lester Wendover and Tom Smith, discover the wreck of a small plane high up a mountain pass near the California-Nevada border. Sitting against a rock is the blackened corpse of a man who could be the "eccentric billionaire adventurer," never named, who disappeared months earlier. Lester and his girlfriend see dollar signs, and decide to play the missing man's warring wife and son against each another, which brings a ton of trouble. On returning to the crash site, Lester and Tom find the body gone. When people start dying in "accidents" after some Cuban thugs show up in nearby Piute Meadows, Calif., Tom is forced to dust off the sniper skills honed during two tours in Iraq. Paul (Double-Edged Sword) vividly captures Tom's high-country survival skills, as the guide devises clever countermeasures to thwart the increasingly desperate attempts to eliminate him.
