Primal Threat

November 19, 2007
Emerson (Firetrap
) takes a page from James Dickey's Deliverance
in this rousing survival yarn that pits a group of mountain bikers against gun-toting, vengeance-obsessed adversaries and the unleashed fury of Mother Nature. Zak Polanski, a 28-year-old firefighter, is looking forward to a long weekend in the wilds of western Washington with his buddies. Their goal to traverse the Cascade Mountains, however, is almost derailed when authorities declare all backwoods areas in the state off limits due to wildfires. Deciding to risk it, the bikers set off into the pristine wilderness only to run into a raucous group of affluent adventurers. Polanski is shocked to find his former girlfriend's fiancé, William “Scooter” Potter III, leading the drunken crew. Equal parts “reckless brats and self-satisfied billionaires,” Potter and his accomplices begin to antagonize Polanski. As tensions rise, so does Polanski's willingness to murder the man who, in his mind, stole away his future wife. While the pacing is consistently pedal-to-the-metal and the intense description of the approaching wildfires memorable, too many two-dimensional characters undermine the thrills.

December 1, 2007
Five friends, three of them firefighters and all of them biking enthusiasts, set out to test themselves on the steep inclines of remote logging roads in Washington's Cascade Mountains. The weekend jaunt goes awry when they are pursued by another group, this one in SUVs and armed with rifles, led by a psycho who believes one of the bikers stole his girlfriend. The original intent is simple harassment, but when one of the harassers dies in a fall, the others become convinced he was murdered by the bikers and set out for revenge. It's a less-plausible version of James Dickey's Deliverance because the motivation of the psycho's seemingly sane friends is never fully convincing. No matter, because once Emerson sets events in motion, they proceed with a horrific inevitability. Emerson, the author of a deservedly popular crime series featuring Seattle detective Thomas Black, breaks new ground with his latest offering, but he brings a familiar asset to the task. There are few writers in any genre who can sustain a narrative at such breakneck speed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)