The wild inside A novel of suspense

Christine Carbo

Book - 2015

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MYSTERY/Carbo Christin
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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Published
New York : Atria Paperback 2015.
Language
English
Main Author
Christine Carbo (author)
Edition
First Atria Paperback edition
Physical Description
404 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781476775456
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When Ted Systead was 14, his father was killed by a bear while they were camping in Glacier National Park. Now a special agent for the National Park Service, Systead is assigned a homicide investigation that sends him back to Glacier, where a man has been tied to a tree and mauled to death by a grizzly bear. The victim, Victor Lance, had alienated plenty of suspects, from battered girlfriends to sociopathic drug dealers. Systead is stymied by a lack of evidence, thanks to the bear that destroyed the body. Unable to continue repressing the past, Systead struggles to reconcile flashbacks of his father's horrific death with his responsibility to find Lance's bear and his human killers. Sharp, introspective Systead is a strong series lead, and Carbo rolls out solid procedural details, pitting Systead against Department of the Interior bureaucrats. The grittiness of the poverty-wracked area surrounding Glacier plays against the park's dangerous beauty in this dark foray into the wilderness subgenre. Put this one in the hands of those who enjoy Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch novels and Julia Keller's Bell Elkins series.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Carbo's evocative debut, a top-priority case takes Denver-based National Parks Service special agent Ted Systead to just about the last place he'd like to go-starkly beautiful Glacier National Park, where at age 14 he survived a grizzly bear attack that killed his father. Making matters worse, the murder Ted is investigating involves a man who was bound to a tree within the park and then mauled, probably while still alive, by a grizzly. Little of the investigation plays out predictably, especially once it emerges that the victim was an abusive meth head. As the haunted Ted struggles to come to terms with his history while navigating the twisty, increasingly scary trail the case takes, Carbo paints a moving picture of complex, flawed people fighting to make their way in a wilderness where little is black or white, except the smoky chiaroscuro of the sweeping Montana sky. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Grizzly bears, murder, mauling, and mayhem mix in Carbo's debut novel. Ted Systead's past and present intersect in an unexpectedand chillingmanner against the incongruously gorgeous backdrop of Glacier National Park. When Systead was a kid, his father, a pathologist, was dragged off and killed by a grizzly bear in Glacier. Now, decades later, Systead is a homicide investigator for the Department of the Interior based out of Denver. When the body of drug user and general lowlife Victor Lance is found shredded by a park grizzly after having been secured to a tree, Systead must push back against his own demons to work the case. In the process, he reluctantly teams with Park Officer Monty Harris, who he suspects is little but a spy for his boss, Eugene Ford. But, as they work their ways through the people who populated Lance's life (his mother, former girlfriend, and others), Systead gains a grudging respect for Monty and finds himself unraveling other peoples' lives in order to get at the truth. Carbo likes detail and packs the book with trivia about the park and its wildlife inhabitants, which prove interesting. However, when it comes to literary restraint, the author comes up short, launching into exhaustive and ultimately extraneous detail about the characters and their lives, forcing readers to wade through a surfeit of description and a flood of characters. Although the writing is fine, the plotting isn't electrifying and the story is not hypnotic enough to withstand the flood of information the author unleashes. By Page 50, she's introduced more than 20 named characters, many of whom serve next to no purpose. In subsequent chapters, even more characters pop up, contributing nothing more than their presences to the unfolding plot. While the park setting's attractive and has potential, the excessive detail and avalanche of characters, combined with a protagonist who doesn't seem all that competent, get in the way of narrative drive. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Wild Inside 1 Fall 2010 IF I COULD reveal one particular thing about my way of thinking it would be this: I was a fourteen-year-old boy when that feral, panic-filled night ruined my ability to see the glass as half full. It's still hard to talk about, but in terms of self-definition, nothing comes close to that crucial three-hour span of hellish time when the emotional freedom that comes from trusting the foundation one stands on would wither like a late-fall leaf. Up until then, my mom, Mary Systead, with her hazel eyes and dimples, a hospital pharmacist and a lover of self-help and pop-psychology books, had always ridden me about being a positive thinker, telling me that I had a bad habit of seeing the glass as half empty and that if I didn't learn to overcome it, it would have a bad effect on my life. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. And later, I couldn't imagine what could be more negative than what ended up happening: losing my dad and lying in the hospital for weeks like a heavy bag of sand, listening to the orderlies telling me how lucky I was not to have died. But that desolate late-summer night all those years ago at Oldman Lake, the stuff of great sensationalism and freaky campfire stories, isn't what's interesting to me now. What is notable is my knack for glimpsing the dark intersection of good and evil in people and seeing how it can be traced back to that fateful period. Because, although this can be taken as positive thinking itself--and I'll admit that traces of it creep in--my critical nature has made me fairly decent at what I do, which is working as a special agent--we call it Series Eighteen-Eleven--for the Department of the Interior's National Park Service. Most people think of me as a glorified ranger because nobody ever imagines that crime occurs in the nation's parks. But it does: drug manufacturing, cultivation and trafficking, illegal game trading, theft, arson, archeological vandalism, senseless violence, and, of course, homicide. Not to mention that the woods happen to be a great place to dump bodies. The United States has fifty-eight national parks with about eighty million acres of unpaved, unpopulated land. I and two guys from the department are trained to undertake homicide investigations and are stationed in the western region, which means our offices are in Denver so that we can cover numerous sites: Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Bryce Canyon, Glacier, Joshua Tree, Mesa Verde, Death Valley, the Great Sand Dunes, the Olympic Peninsula. . . . Mostly, we work solo on cases, even homicides, since we have so much help from Park Police--they're Series Double-O-Eight-Three. Sometimes, being assisted by Park Police is helpful, but sometimes it's a pain in the ass since we're not in the habit of working together and we often clash in the way we go about the little things. It's the nuances, like knowing when to stay quiet, when to offer a small compliment, when to put on the unimpressed, bored look or to take the lead or to follow. The other thing that can be traced to that night is my obsession with the grizzly. Ursus arctos horribilis. The grizzly was listed in 1975 as a threatened species in the lower forty-eight after being trapped and hunted to near extermination in the last century. One would think I'd be terrified of them, and here's the deal: I am. In fact, I became a policeman after college, because even though I double-majored in criminology and forestry, I felt this fairly significant panic at the base of my sternum at the thought of being alone in the woods. There's a catch for me, though: when I read or know about one of them getting shot by a hunter (always accidentally they claim) or getting euthanized for becoming too dependent on human garbage, I'm conflicted. I can't tell if I'm pleased, sad, or pissed off. It's as if each time one of these specimens, with their scooped, broad noses, cinnamon and silver-tipped coarse hair, eyes like amethysts, and the infamous hump protruding like a warning, is killed, either another piece of my father dies with them or he is given a small slice of justice. Over the years, I've become more and more intrigued, as if they've taken on some godly status. I've studied them from afar--reading everything I could get my hands on: mostly journals and published graduate theses on behavior, habitat use, and demography. After all, knowledge is power, and power helps alleviate fear. So one could say that for a detective-slash-quasi-grizzly aficionado, I was heading into a perfect storm with this next case. And I could say this about the case as well: my torn recipe for positive thinking, with its already unpatchable shreds, would turn to jagged teeth, biting me even deeper than I thought possible. Excerpted from The Wild Inside by Christine Carbo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.