Book Review: North of Nowhere

After five years in hiding from their murderous father(the head of an LA crime family), Kristen and Ryan McIntyre have been tracked to a small Montana town. They barely escape in a small plane, but gunfire hits the fuel line. The pilot, a man who has been raising them as his own, manages to crash land in the middle of the Montana wilderness. The siblings hike deep into the woods, searching desperately for safety, unaware of the severity of the approaching storm.

As the storm builds, their Aunt Ruby isn’t the only person looking for them. Their father Boyd McIntyre has hired an expert tracker to find and bring them home. And rancher Nick Lorenzo, who knows these mountains better than anyone and doesn’t understand why the kids are running, is on their trail too. But there is a greater threat to Kristen and Ryan out there. More volatile than the incoming blizzard, more dangerous than the family they ran from or the natural predators they could encounter. Who finds them first could determine if they live or die.

North of Nowhere by Allison Brennan was published in August 2023 by Minotaur Books.

I selected this title for our Mystery Book Discussion in November. While more a thriller, it met several of our chosing criteria (including having come out in mass market paperback recently).

This was my first novel from Brennan, and I found the story to be engaging right from the start. The third-person point-of-view bounces from character to character as each chapter unfolds (sometimes we get two pov's in a single chapter). Normally I am put off, but this time it worked for me because this fast-paced story sticks to a fairly chronological order (with only a few occasional flashbacks) with each new scene building off the last.

I also appreciated the notes in the Acknowledgment section regarding how the first draft did not work, and that she shelved it only to completely revamp it nearly five years later. That is encouraging for writers that occasional it is not the right time for our story to come into the world.