The Signal

Read effortlessly by T. Ryder Smith, this modern-day Western sounds like a story told around a crackling campfire in the high mountain air. Ryder artfully captures Mack's Wyoming twang and Vonnie'e educated Eastern speech. The once-married couple catches far more than their share of trouble when they embark on their annual fishing trip one last time. But Mack has a secret, and the plot leads the listener up and down the Wyoming trails as this tale of intrigue and contemporary crime unfolds. Carlson's adventure plunges the couple into a high-action ending. The glorious mountains that surround Jackson, Wyoming, provide the backdrop. Romance, mystery, and a dash of the new--yet still wild--West make this production compelling. A.D.M. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 16, 2009
The dense Wind River Mountains of western Wyoming is where Carlson (Five Skies
) sets his brooding latest, a tale of expired love and desperate measures. Mack, son of a longtime rancher, has made many missteps in life, culminating in a recent stint in jail where “he'd rusted like an old post when the weather turned.” While he's in jail, his recently ex-wife Vonnie agrees to join him one last time on their annual ritual of backpacking through the Wyoming wilderness to fish, camp and rediscover each other. Mack, though, has a hidden motive: a friend/technical genius has hired him to retrieve a valuable drone that's crash-landed in the forest. Carlson describes the couple's six days wandering the wooded terrain in delicate, measured prose, careful to miss neither the lush scenery nor the incrementally amplified tension as Mack edges closer to his prize and shady characters from the past appear. Carlson has produced a work of masterful fiction, combining the sad inevitability of a doomed relationship with sheer nail-biting suspense.