The Wild Inside: A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo Narrated by R. C. Bray

Overview

For fans of Louise Penny, C. J. Box, and Nevada Barr comes a haunting crime novel set in Glacier National Park, where one man finds himself on a collision course with the dark heart of the wild and the even darker heart of human nature.

It was a clear, starry night in Glacier National Park. Fourteen-year-old Ted Systead and his father were camping peacefully beneath the rugged peaks and sweeping sky when the unimaginable happened: Ted's father was mauled by a grizzly bear and dragged to his death.

Now, twenty years later, as special agent for the Department of the Interior, Ted is called back to investigate a crime that echoes the horror of that night. Only this time, the victim was tied to a tree before the animal's attack. Ted teams up with one of the park officers-a man named Monty, whose pleasant exterior masks an all-too-vivid knowledge of the area. Residents of the nearby community are less than forthcoming. Suspicious of outsiders and intimately connected to the wilderness that surrounds them, they confront their fellow man and nature with equal measures of reverence and brutality. As the days pass with no clear answers, not only is human life at stake, so too is that of a majestic creature who carries with it valuable evidence. Ted's search for truth takes him far into the wilderness, on the trail of a killer, and eventually to a shocking and unexpectedly personal conclusion.

Rich in atmosphere and evocative, lush descriptions, The Wild Inside is a gripping debut novel about the wondrously perilous intersection between man and nature.

Editorial Reviews

Steve Berry

...stays in your mind long after you’ve put the book down. I’m still thinking about it. Prepare to run the gamut of emotions with this fine treat of a story. Then, in the years ahead, be on the lookout for more from this fresh new voice in the thriller genre.

Deborah Crombie

"Fans of Nevada Barr will love this tense, atmospheric thriller with its majestic Glacier National Park setting. The Wild Inside is a stunning debut!"

CurledUp

"The most powerful and compelling aspect of the novel is the balancing of criminal investigation and the emotional baggage that burdens the protagonist....The wilderness provides a lush background for this combination of crime and personal redemption, the resolution as nuanced as the death of Victor Lance."

The Billings Gazette

If the key to a mystery’s success is keeping the reader guessing, The Wild Inside is a fine example of the genre.

Publishers Weekly

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…. an evocative debut.

Tawni O'Dell

The brutality and fragility of Glacier National Park’s wilderness provides the perfect backdrop for this well-crafted, absorbing novel about the barbarities and kindnesses of the humans living on its edge. Christine Carbo is a writer to watch.

Booklist

Sharp, introspective Systead is a strong series lead, and Carbo rolls out solid procedural details, pitting him 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.

Linda Castillo

An intense and thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride. Christine Carbo’s literary voice echoes with her love of nature, her knowledge of its brutality, and the wild and beautiful locale of Montana. The Wild Inside is a tour de force of suspense that will leave you breathlessly turning the pages late into the night.

Kira Peikoff

"As haunting and vivid as the scenery it depicts, The Wild Inside is a masterful portrait of the savagery of nature—both the great untamed outdoors and the human soul. Highly recommended."

Kirkus Reviews

Grizzly bears, murder, mauling, and mayhem mix in Carbo's debut novel. Ted Systead's past and present intersect in an unexpected—and chilling—manner against the incongruously gorgeous backdrop of Glacier National Park.

New York Times bestselling author Linda Castillo

An intense and thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride…a tour de force of suspense.”

Billings Gazette (Montana)

If the key to a mystery’s success is keeping the reader guessing, The Wild Inside is a fine example of the genre.”

New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry

Prepare to run the gamut of emotions with this fine treat of a story. Then, in the years ahead, be on the lookout for more from this fresh new voice in the thriller genre.”

New York Times bestselling author Deborah Crombie

[A] tense, atmospheric thriller with its majestic Glacier National Park setting…a stunning debut!”

AudioFile

With precision and authority, R. C. Bray narrates this intense, haunting story…Carbo describes the great beauty of Glacier in such detail that listeners will smell and feel the crisp mountain air and visualize the power and brutality of nature…Bray maintains a consistent pace and fluid expressiveness with the fast-moving plot and well-crafted characters.”

Booklist

Sharp, introspective Systead is a strong series lead, and Carbo rolls out solid procedural details, pitting him 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.

Kirkus Reviews

2015-04-02
Grizzly bears, murder, mauling, and mayhem mix in Carbo's debut novel. Ted Systead's past and present intersect in an unexpected—and chilling—manner 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169720433
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	06/16/2015
Series:	Glacier Mysteries , #1
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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