Every few years, someone writes a book about the wonders of living the simple life in the wilderness. For every person who loves that life, there are hundreds-no thousands-of others who can't wait to get away from it, and to enjoy the comforts of civilization. These people need a spokesperson, so Anne Barton, whose family lived for two years when she was a child, in a tent in the mountains, decided to set a mystery novel in an isolated mountain valley. Fourteen-year-old Derek Taylor discovers that the simple life isn't so simple after all when his family settles in a mountain valley, far from civilization. In fact, it's very hard work, even for him and his little sister. His parents want to get their children away from the drugs and street crime of an urban environment. But Derek meets another teen-age boy, who shows him how to catch fish right under the nose of the conservation officer, how to use smokeless tobacco, and where the marijuana is grown. Derek is dragged into a murder investigation when he and the other boy trip an alarm at a marijuana grow-op, and in running away, fall into an open grave. He unwittingly takes his sister into potential danger while looking for clues to the identity of the murderer, and also when he discovers that another, more subtle crime is being worked in the mountain valley. Anne Barton now lives, in comfort, in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia.