A shredded tent, a missing man, a grizzly excavating a campsite, and a biologist hell bent on defending her bear DNA study all converge in Glacier Park’s Cut Bank Valley one bright June morning.

For readers of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire books, Paul Doiron, The Thursday Murder Club, and Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, comes a fresh take on the outdoor mystery.

Trails laborer Clancy Dyer enlists the help of ranger Mack Savage to find her coworker. Following divergent trails, the two untangle a knot of misdeeds and betrayals. Told in multiple voices from Glacier’s eclectic east side community, Baited grapples with the controversy surrounding grizzly bears, the redemptive power of wilderness, and how to behave honorably in an unjust world.

Colleen O’Brien’s writing was published in the anthologies A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, and A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Montana Quarterly, Flathead Living, The Missoulian, Whitefish Review, Montana Outdoors, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Weddings, and on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Baited is her first novel. The manuscript was awarded the Michael K. Smith Fellowship at Porches Writing Retreat in Virginia. She is co-owner of several East Glacier, Montana businesses and lives with her family near Glacier Park.

Photo by Marianne Wiest