Spider Mountain

Cam Richter has already enjoyed the traditional rewards of a career in law enforcement: danger, enemies, damaged nerves and the growing suspicion that retirement would be much easier if criminals respected it. In P. T. Deutermann’s Spider Mountain, the former North Carolina police officer and reluctant private investigator ventures into the Appalachian wilderness, where the scenery is magnificent, the roads are questionable and certain local residents would strongly prefer outsiders to admire the mountains from somewhere else.

Richter is approached by Special Agent Carrie Santangelo of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, who has been looking into a disturbing case involving a missing child and a deeply isolated mountain community. She has encountered resistance of the emphatic rural variety and needs someone capable of operating outside ordinary police channels. Cam, being intelligent enough to recognise an extremely dangerous situation but apparently not sensible enough to avoid one, agrees to investigate.

The trail leads into the remote country surrounding Spider Mountain, territory dominated by the Creigh family. The Creighs possess land, influence, armed relatives and their own approach to civic administration. At the centre of the clan is the formidable Grinny Creigh, a matriarch whose family values are unlikely to appear embroidered on decorative cushions. Her authority reaches across the mountain, and questions from strangers are treated less as conversation than as a preliminary stage of trespassing.

Cam soon discovers that official jurisdiction becomes rather theoretical in places where everyone is related, silence is inherited and the nearest assistance may be several steep miles away. The mountains offer caves, ravines, thick forest and plenty of attractive locations in which a troublesome investigator might cease troubling anyone. Nature provides the grandeur; human beings handle the menace.

Fortunately, Cam is accompanied by his German shepherds, Frick and Frack, whose investigative methods rely less upon warrants and rather more upon teeth. They are loyal, intelligent and frequently better judges of character than the people around them. In a thriller populated by law officers, criminals and secretive mountain families, the dogs emerge as unusually trustworthy members of the cast, although their interviewing technique lacks delicacy.

Deutermann combines police procedure, backwoods suspense and outdoor survival in a story that moves from official enquiries to a much more personal confrontation. What begins as an investigation into a missing child expands into a struggle against a family system built upon fear, violence and generations of secrecy. The deeper Cam travels into the mountains, the clearer it becomes that leaving again may require more than a reliable map.

The Appalachian setting supplies much of the novel’s atmosphere. This is a landscape at once beautiful and forbidding, where isolation can preserve independence, community and traditions—but can also preserve things that ought to have been exposed to daylight some time ago. Mobile reception is poor, local memories are long and even the trees appear reluctant to give evidence.

Spider Mountain is the second novel featuring Cam Richter, following The Cat Dancers, but it can be enjoyed as a vigorous standalone thriller. Readers returning to the series will find Cam once again pursuing the truth with determination, tactical experience and the admirable inability to leave a dangerous secret alone. Newcomers need only understand that he has a complicated past, two excellent dogs and a remarkable talent for entering places where people have already warned him not to go.

Ideal for readers who enjoy rugged crime thrillers, isolated communities, sinister family empires, wilderness action and heroes whose attempts at a quieter life immediately produce gunfire. Deutermann keeps the investigation moving while steadily tightening the sense of confinement, proving that wide-open country can become extremely claustrophobic once the wrong people know you are in it.

This copy is in Very Good condition, having negotiated Spider Mountain with considerably less damage than several of its inhabitants. Offered by Crappy Old Books, it is a tense and atmospheric excursion into a beautiful corner of North Carolina where hospitality is conditional, family loyalty is compulsory and an innocent walking holiday would be a catastrophically poor choice.

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