Excerpt from Descent by Tim Johnston, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Well, sir. We found your boy way up there on the mountain, on a rental bike. So I'm just wondering, sir, where you're at."

"Caitlin," Angela said suddenly, and Grant's heart leapt and he said, "Yes. Let me speak to my daughter. Let me speak to Caitlin."

"Your daughter—?" said the other man, and was silent. In the silence was the sound of his breathing. Was the sound of him making an adjustment to his sheriff's belt. Was the sound of a woman's voice paging unintelligibly down the empty hospital corridor.

When he spoke again he sounded like some other man altogether.

"Mr. Courtland," he said, and Grant stepped toward the window as though he would walk through it. He'd taken the representations of the mountains on the resort maps, with their colorful tracery of runs and trails and lifts, as the mountains themselves—less mountains than playgrounds fashioned into the shapes of mountains by men and money. Now he saw the things themselves, so green and massive, humped one upon the other like a heaving sea. Angela stopped him physically, her thumbs in his biceps. She raised on her toes that she might hear every word. "Mr. Courtland," said the sheriff. "Your son came in alone."

Excerpted from Descent by Tim Johnson. Copyright © 2015 by Tim Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.