Book excerpt: Based on a true story--one of Idaho's strangest murders (1917). Frieda lives by the laws of the wilderness in primitive isolation with her husband--until she finds something more important than raw survival. Suspense intensifies to the shocking conclusion, then resolves in deliverance. Set on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. "This is one of those rare gems... a small but powerful work. It captures the roughness of life and the people, and the awesome land in which they struggled... The writing is finely balanced, the tale both universal and yet specific to its time and place... up there with Conrad Richter's Sea of Grass." -Persia Woolley, author of The Guinevere Trilogy