Montana first-time novelist and winner of a Michael K. Smith Fellowship, Colleen O’Brien, visits Elk River Books, 122 S. 2nd St., to discuss her thrilling mystery, Baited, on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 7 pm. The free event will include a book signing and reception.
When Glacier Park trails laborer Clancy Dyer discovers her coworker Ezra missing and his tent shredded the summer of the grizzly bear DNA study, she alerts district ranger Mack Savage, who launches a search and rescue mission that unearths a growing tangle of misdeeds and betrayals.
“O’Brien casts a wicked, believable spell of deceit and heartbreak, a burn of a tale that begins to bubble and hiss, and then rapidly boil over,” writes Debra Magpie Earling, author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. “Baited is an intricately plotted masterpiece. A stunning, edge-of-your-seat drama. An exquisite all-night read.”
O’Brien’s writing appears in the anthologies A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, Bright Bones, and A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Montana Quarterly, Flathead Living, The Missoulian, Whitefish Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Weddings, and on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and has taught English at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. A former employee of the National Park Service, she is the co-owner of several East Glacier businesses and lives with her family near Glacier National Park.
For those who can’t attend in person, the event will live-stream at YouTube.com/ElkRiverBooks.
