Beyond the Wild River

In 1893, a young woman finds love and danger along Ontario’s Nipigon River in Maine’s (The House Between Tides) thrilling historical adventure. Nineteen-year-old Evelyn Ballantyre loves her father, Charles, a respected magistrate, and is all the more attached to him because she’s never known her mother. But in recent years Charles’s business ventures have kept him far from her side, and the close relationship they once enjoyed is but a memory. When he invites her to accompany him on a fishing trip along the raging Nipigon, she jumps at the chance, unaware that their guide will be James Douglas, her father’s former stable boy, who was involved in a murder five years previously. Old grudges, crimes, and murderous impulses soon come to the fore as a connection sparks between James and Evelyn. Meticulous research and descriptive passages of lush, beautiful landscapes frame Maine’s riveting portrait of a thoughtful young woman who yearns for more than is offered by her station and her gender, and the rough-and-tumble young man who is inexorably drawn to her. (Apr.)