At loose ends during the summer months, English teacher and poet Lee Squires agrees to do a favor for a friend by serving as cook on a Montana pack horse trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness. It will get her out of D.C. and into fresh country air. The “dudes” on the trip are members of the Strand family – patriarch Cyrus, his children, his Italian wife (and the children's stepmother), and his lawyer. Only Cyrus seems enthusiastic about the trip. The rest of the party is there to protect their financial interests, since Cyrus holds the family purse-strings. Things begin to go very wrong after Cyrus announces he's made a new will. One of the newly disinherited is angry enough to kill. Does Lee have the wits to flush out a killer and make it out of the wilderness alive?

The plot is a common one for mysteries, but the setting is unique. The Bob Marshall Wilderness does not have roads and is only accessible via trails. Its remoteness works as well as a snowstorm or an island to isolate a group of suspects from law enforcement. Other than some passing references to news events from the early 1990s, there is little to give the book a dated feel. Nevada Barr's readers might enjoy this one. ( )