Lightning Within Us

Set in the remote mountains of Central Idaho and along the edge of Hells Canyon in eastern Oregon, this novel takes place in 1993, though for Lina Hudson, time stopped fifteen years earlier. The summer of 1978 was hot and dry, and Lina and her twin, Rainy, were nearly sixteen as their long closeness began to come apart. Each of them was trying to build a new self in the isolated Yellow River Valley, which was the latest stop in a string of relocations forced on their restless, increasingly desperate parents, who were struggling to hold their marriage together.

Lina's father had become fixated on a treasure hunt built around a cryptic poem written by a withdrawn collector. He was certain he could find the treasure and that it would transform the family's future. Consumed by their crumbling lives, neither parent noticed when Lina, who felt like an outsider in the close-knit town, fell in with two wild teenagers, Cassie and Silas, who followed their own code. They led her onto ghost trails, old mountain paths long abandoned that they were working to bring back, and they tracked the outlaws who pried crystals from the rock to sell in Boise. In their company, Lina could set aside her drifting sister and her parents' constant fighting.

That peace ends when a threat from Cassie's past resurfaces and Cassie must make a fatal choice, sending events into a disastrous wildfire. Two girls climbed the mountain, and only one came back. Fifteen years later, Lina holds everyone at arm's length, with the exception of Joe Grider, a drifter who comes and goes from her life. She lives in dread that someone will learn her true identity and what happened back then, and she believes she has managed to stay hidden. Then her father arrives with a postcard that appears to have been written by Cassie, who should be dead. Did Cassie survive? Was Lina really not to blame for her death, as she has always believed? Finding the answers means going back to the town the fire destroyed and facing the long memories of the people who still live there.