The Landing

The third Daniel Thorsen novel. It begins the spring after What the Lake Keeps.

Last August a young Norwegian working a summer job at a mining exploration camp in the British Columbia mountains went down to the river landing to collect freight and never came back. A glacier lake upstream had burst, the camp said, and the flood took him. Three weeks later the river carried him across the border into Alaska.

His grandmother, in a house above the harbour at Ulsteinvik, has his last messages, and they do not say what the camp says. She asks the one American relative she has ever spoken to, a former LAPD homicide detective who lives in a van, to find out what happened.

Thorsen takes the ferry north to Nesvik, an island fishing town settled by Norwegians and split down the middle over the mine upriver, in the week of its Little Norway Festival. From there the trail runs up a glacial river into a camp where everyone is keeping something back, and to a dog who has been waiting at the landing all spring.