The Ridge Runner: A Wilderness Survival Thriller

The mountain was supposed to be her recovery. Instead, it became her hunting ground.Eleven months after a devastating eighty-foot fall on Mount Hood shattered her tibia, former elite ultra-runner Maya Vance refuses to accept that her athletic career is over. Ignoring seasonal trail closures and severe winter storm warnings, she heads into Washington's rugged North Cascades for a solo twenty-two-mile run over the knife-edge basalt ridge of Devil's Backbone.She never reaches the turnaround.Ambushed by an invisible tripwire and dragged into an unmapped wilderness hollow, Maya wakes up underground, locked in the freezing root cellar of an off-grid homestead. Her captors are the Brand clan: an isolated, predatory mountain family led by the ruthless patriarch Silas, who has spent forty years harvesting hikers along the Highway 2 corridor-aided by a compromised deputy who ensures search-and-rescue sweeps never find them.To Silas, Maya is just seasonal labor until the frost takes her. But they didn't account for what it takes to break an endurance athlete.Armed with only a rusted crosscut saw blade, a stolen lever-action rifle, and an unmatched capacity to endure physical agony, Maya triggers a violent breakout into a blinding, sub-zero Arctic blizzard. With tracking hounds on her blood trail, armed men hunting her across wind-scoured ridges, and the surgical plate in her leg freezing from within, survival comes down to a single brutal truth: In a race across thirty miles of deadfall and black ice, she knows how to suffer longer than anyone hunting her.