An ambitious wildlife biologist, Colden McComb hikes the rugged Adirondack mountains, tracking moose and beaver, and navigates the halls of academia, jockeying for a place in the male-dominated world of conservation research. Over the course of one tumultuous year, she becomes entangled with a series of unsettling events that none of her scientific training can help her explain.

Best-selling author Laurel Saville uses incisive prose and evocative imagery in another page-turning story that picks up where her novel, “North of Here,” ended. She brings readers into the brooding backcounty of Upstate New York, where Colden searches for connections between petty thefts, sabotage vandalism, sexually-explicit emails, office gossip, Sasquatch myths, grainy game-camera images, an elusive chimera, a teenage runaway, and the contradictions of her own heritage. Alongside her handyman father, social worker step-mother, and a lawyer with secrets of his own, Colden confronts the mysteries she finds beneath the trees, and also within her own heart.