The books
Wild Places
Every Wild Places book is a complete case, solved inside its own covers. Claire’s story runs in order.
They Go Up Alone
Olympic Peninsula, Washington
She reads strangers for a living. This time you’ll see it before she does.
A missing-woman flyer gone amber in a store window.
Thirteen miles of trail with the river on the left.
A storm that takes the trail out behind her.
Travel journalist Claire Oakes hikes into the Olympic rainforest to write about a 1931 ranger chalet the river is finally carrying off. Five strangers are already in that valley when she gets there. By the second morning one of them is dead on the bank with her hands folded too neatly, the crossings between there and the road are gone, and the helicopter cannot fly for three days.
Four left. One room. One of them did it.
Claire’s whole trade is telling a silence that’s safe from a silence that’s a scream. She got it wrong once, about her own sister, and she has spent eleven years paying for it. She is about to get it wrong again. Warmly, generously, and right in front of you.
This is not a thriller with a twist you won’t see coming. It’s a thriller where you see it coming and cannot reach her.
Kindle, Kindle Unlimited and paperback.
The Smaller Thing
Gaspésie, Québec
She reads strangers for a living. This time she is right, and nobody in the room can hear it.
A guided week in the Quebec backcountry, in a place with one road in.
The same guide. The same February week. The same mountain.
Five years ago a woman went up with him and did not come down.
Travel journalist Claire Oakes has ten thousand words to write about Willa Tanner, thirty-four, whose death was searched, documented and closed. Nothing in the report is wrong. That is the thing that is wrong with it.
On Claire’s first morning on the mountain, a man goes out at first light and dies on a slope he was told was safe. By evening the only road out is under three hundred metres of avalanche debris and the police are not coming. Six of them will have to walk out over the height of land: three days, two huts, no way back, and the man picking the ground is the one she has been trying to warn them about.
So she says it. Out loud, in English, through a translator, to people who are kind to her. And what arrives at the other end is always a size smaller than what she said.
Kindle, Kindle Unlimited and paperback.
They All Say So
Wester Ross, Scotland
She reads strangers for a living. This time nobody is lying to her, and that is the problem.
Sixty people live in the glen.
Fourteen of them tell her the same story in four days.
Every word of it true. All of it a lie.
Travel journalist Claire Oakes came to the Scottish Highlands to write about a place that empties on a date, and got there six days after a twenty-eight-year-old woman went up onto the hill for the estate she worked for and did not come back. Kirsty Maclennan sent one message before the water came up. Nobody’s to come out in this. By Claire’s fourth day, six separate people have handed her that sentence word for word, in six separate kitchens, without being asked.
They also feed her. Drive her. Give her a room, a hot meal, a borrowed torch, a search party. Nobody in that glen lies to her, not once, in three weeks. That is the problem.
The road out is open every day she is there. It makes no difference at all.
Twice a Day
The sea shuts the way out twice a day.
Claire Oakes went to the Lost Coast to write about the stretch of California the highway turned inland to avoid. Twenty five miles of it under a wall of cliff. No road, no phone signal, and three places where the beach only exists at low tide.
On the third morning a woman is lying at the tide line. Six people are left with her, and the way out runs at the speed of the water.
A complete case, start to finish. Free, and not sold anywhere.