The Beautiful and The Wild
It’s summer in Alaska and the light surrounding the shipping-container-turned-storage shed where Liv Russo is being held prisoner is fuzzy and gray. Around her is thick forest and jagged mountains. In front of her, across a clearing, is a low-slung cabin with a single window that spills a wash of yellow light onto bare ground. Illuminated in that light is the father of her child, a man she once loved. A man who is now her jailer. Liv vows to do anything to escape.
Carrying her own secrets and a fierce need to protect her young son, Liv must navigate a new world where extreme weather, starvation, and dangerous wildlife are not the only threats she faces. With winter's arrival imminent, she knows she must reckon with her past and the choices that brought her to the unforgiving Alaskan landscape if she is ever going to make it out alive.
A story of survival in the wilds of Alaska, The Beautiful and The Wild explores the question of whether we can ever truly know the person we love—or ourselves.
What they say…
“The Beautiful and The Wild by Peggy Townsend is a gripping, edge-of-your-seat Alaskan wilderness survival story and so much more; a brilliantly insightful and compelling dysfunctional family drama that kept me turning the pages at warp speed. I loved this book!”
– Karen Dionne, #1 internationally bestselling author of The Marsh King’s Daughter and The Wicked Sister.
“Page-turning. Exhilarating. Unforgettable. I read The Beautiful and the Wild in one riveting gulp. It's both compelling psychological suspense and a wise contemplation of the destructive power of secrets—not just those kept from us by others, but also secrets we keep from ourselves.”
– Meg Waite Clayton, internationally bestselling author of The Postmistress of Paris.
“In The Beautiful and the Wild, Townsend delivers a masterful, heartfelt, slow-burn literary thriller as unpredictable as the wilds of Alaska. A very smart page-turner, driven by a fierce, complex heroine.”
– Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of The Wonder Test and The Year of Fog.
In the wilderness of Alaska there is more to fear than storms, starvation and grizzly bears. There is also the person you love.
OTHER TITLES
See Her Run (Aloa Snow Book 1)
The body of a young adventure runner is found in the Nevada desert and cops rule the death a suicide. The victim’s boyfriend had just died and injuries were threatening her running career. But things are not as they seem and ex-newspaper reporter Aloa Snow is called on to look into the young woman’s death. Snow, let go from her job at the L.A. Times for a mistake in judgment, knows this case won’t make up for the sins of her past but hopes it might be a small payment against her karmic debt. What she discovers takes her into a world of mystery and corporate intrigue and could leave her running for her own life.
The Thin Edge (Aloa Snow Book 2)
Disgraced crime reporter Aloa Snow is scrambling to get her life back on track by doing what she does best: investigating hard-to-solve cases. But the latest one is personal. The son of her friend Tick―aging anarchist, confidant, and unofficial colleague―has been accused of a high-profile murder. The victim is Corrine Daniels, ex-prosecutor and wife of a heroic but now-paralyzed FBI interrogator. Corrine had enemies, but she also had a secret lover in Tick’s son, who, without an alibi, is now directly in the cops’ crosshairs.
Luckily, Aloa’s got a lock on others who may have had a reason for murder―reasons that plunge her into a world of vigilante justice and a horrific, decades-old crime. It’s only when Aloa’s investigation turns threatening that she realizes she’s closing in on the killer faster than she imagined.
Now that she’s being pushed toward the edge, Aloa fears that there’s nowhere to go but down.
About Me
Peggy Townsend is longtime newspaper reporter who has won multiple state and national awards for her work. She has chased a serial killer through a graveyard at midnight, panhandled with street kids, and sat on a mountaintop with woman who counted her riches in each morning's sunrise. She has rafted rivers, come face-to-face with a grizzly bear and, twice, lived in her van for seven weeks while traveling across the country. She divides her time between the Central Coast of California and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
