Scapegoat: Patrick Flint 4 — A What Doesn't Kill You Super Series Mystery

For fans of C.J. Box, Nevada Barr, and Craig Johnson — a Summer 1977 Wyoming wilderness thriller in which a canoe trip with eleven children goes very, very sideways.

Dr. Patrick Flint rents canoes in Jackson, Wyoming for a family vacation on the Tukudika River — himself, his wife Susanne, his children Trish and Perry, his brother Pete's seven kids, and both sets of grandparents. A dead body floats past on the first day. This is not the warning he takes it for.

Gold prospectors in the backcountry have already killed their partner and aren't interested in witnesses. Trish and five-year-old Bunny get lost and captured. Perry suffers a serious head injury at the waterfall. Patrick's brother Pete stumbles across a hidden gold cave and nearly gets killed for it. When Patrick reaches the guard station, he finds all eight tires on both vehicles slashed and the radio destroyed. Someone is systematically trapping them in the wilderness — and then the grizzly gets into their food.

Scapegoat is the Patrick Flint series' most sprawling adventure — a two-family wilderness ordeal with a twelve-year-old standing guard over an unconscious prisoner, a grandfather navigating nighttime rapids without life jackets to rescue the girls, and a Tukudika Indian elder who appears from nowhere at exactly the right moment. Set in the Bridger-Teton Wilderness along the Tukudika (Sheep-Eater Shoshone) River.

Scapegoat is the fourth Patrick Flint novel, based on the real Wyoming wilderness that author Pamela Fagan Hutchins explored as a child. The eleven children are loosely autobiographical. The gold prospectors are not. Complete series: 9 novels.

Eleven children, a dead body, gold prospectors, a grizzly, slashed tires, and a destroyed radio. Dr. Patrick Flint was not warned about any of this at the canoe rental office. Complete series: 9 novels.