Under Tower Peak

In Paul’s entertaining first novel, a western-flavored thriller, two wilderness guides, Lester Wendover and Tom Smith, discover the wreck of a small plane high up a mountain pass near the California-Nevada border. Sitting against a rock is the blackened corpse of a man who could be the “eccentric billionaire adventurer,” never named, who disappeared months earlier. Lester and his girlfriend see dollar signs, and decide to play the missing man’s warring wife and son against each another, which brings a ton of trouble. On returning to the crash site, Lester and Tom find the body gone. When people start dying in “accidents” after some Cuban thugs show up in nearby Piute Meadows, Calif., Tom is forced to dust off the sniper skills honed during two tours in Iraq. Paul (Double-Edged Sword) vividly captures Tom’s high-country survival skills, as the guide devises clever countermeasures to thwart the increasingly desperate attempts to eliminate him. Agent: Jessica Kaye, Kaye & Mills. (Apr.)