Synopsis
Haunted. Scarred. Alone. And the nightmare’s just beginning.
Of all the end-of-the-world places he could have run to after he was burned, Miles McEwan chose Ross River.
Buried deep in the vast wilderness of the Yukon, it seemed the perfect place to escape the past. Best of all, he could carry on doing what he did best—fighting fire. But five years on, Miles is still troubled by two phantoms of his previous life: the young man whose agonizing death preys on his conscience, and the woman he abandoned as a consequence.
And in the dark forest around Ross River, fire and violence are brewing. As a small blaze becomes an inferno, a group of bear trackers is about to encounter nature in its wildest form. Elsewhere a killer is going about his work, quietly and ruthlessly. As the survivors of the hunting party are picked off one by one and fire rages through the mountains, Miles embarks on a desperate rescue mission, driven by love for a daughter who, until this dangerous summer, had been a perfect stranger.
A remarkable work, The Wildfire Season is an edgy psychological thriller, a supernatural chiller, a terrifying tale of untamed nature, and an unusual—and unusually moving—story of what one can choose to endure in the name of love.
The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio
Striving for an elegiac style, Pyper commits what might be considered a literary crime in anthropomorphizing the two forces of nature that threaten to devastate Ross River. Attributing human sensibility to the forest fire ( as with all fires, it will have no desire but to live ) adds nothing to its already cataclysmic presence. But in conferring a personality on the grizzly bear that deliberately endangers herself when she lingers to mourn her dead cub ( she inhales what s left of his living scents ), he creates a memorable character and a real conflict about which parents and children to root for in his fierce morality tale.