When I told a writer acquaintance that the novel I'm currently drafting is set in Colorado, she told me one of her favorite books, Descent by Tim Johnston, is set largely in Colorado. With a recommendation like that I checked it out an scarfed it down.
The Courtlands are a Wisconsin family—Grant and Angela and their daughter Caitlin, 18, and son, Sean, 16—vacationing in Colorado. Caitlin, a runner, goes for an early morning run in the mountain high above the resort town in which they're staying. Sean follows on his mountain bike. High and alone on the mountain, Sean hit and badly hurt by a truck. The driver offers to take Caitlin down the mountain to a level at which her phone will find a signal. The next thing the parents know is that Sean is in the hospital and Caitlin has vanished.
After the opening chapter, Descent follows Grant, Angela, and Sean as they live on without Caitlin and do what they can to survive with the mystery of her loss. Sean, badly hurt on the mountain, is unable to help the sheriff and his deputy with any useful information about the villain.
Stop reading now if you are going to be bothered by spoilers, although I'll try not to give everything away. We eventually learn (in short chapters of the italic type that I dislike) that Caitlin is chained up in a remote, isolated mountain cabin actually not far from the initiating accident. We never learn much about the villain. He is malevolent and relentless and responsible for the murder of at least two or three other young women. That we don't learn much about the personality of the villain doesn't matter of course. It's enough that we see he's cruel and pitiless and that because nature, the universe, reality are entirely unfeeling, humanity doesn't have to be.
What matters is how Caitlin is able to survive. Obviously the Courtlands are limited. At the beginning of the book they are tourists. What do they know about law enforcement in the Colorado mountains? (Not much.) One of the pleasures of Descent is seeing how plausibly Johnston is able to solve the problem he has set himself.
Another pleasure is the writing. An example chosen at random: "Around noon, with the sun roaring down, he walked to the hand pump near the smaller house, the casita, and struggled with it until at last the water retched up and ran in a cold stream that tasted of stones and iron." Descent skates right on the edge of being too well-written. A couple of times I was bounced out of the story by the beauty, the aptness of an observation or a sentence.
But because Johnston writes so well, he is, I think, able to carry the reader along on the flow of words until the last fifty pages when the tension becomes almost unbearable. I can understand how Descent could become one of another writer's favorite books.
