The Golden Hag: Rippinger, Book 5

Johnston effectively blends murder and the supernatural in his exciting fifth thriller featuring U.S. marshal Cain Rippinger (after 2015’s Buoy 13). Rippinger, “sort of an ad-hoc agent that handles various details for the park service,” is dispatched to kill about a dozen mountain goats near Washington State’s Mount Olympus that have become a nuisance, but that mundane assignment becomes anything but when it turns out that the pilot of the small plane transporting him is actually Vindikis, an angel he once saw and spoke to before. (“[Vindikis’s] presence correlated with unbelievable rescues that would otherwise have left me, and others, dead,” muses Rippinger.) When the plane returns to the airfield, Rippinger loses credibility when he’s told that no one saw anyone else in the aircraft with him. That unsettling opening is just the prologue to another bizarre case, in which Rippinger probes a murder in a hot spring on federal land near Olympic National Park and crosses paths with a cult and evil spirits. Johnston’s solid prose helps to sell the paranormal premise. (BookLife)