When I was in high school, a bunch of my friends and I went to a summer camp for performing artists on an old army base (the one where An Officer & A Gentleman was filmed). My roommate was this cool chick who I had always gotten along with but, for some reason, we got in this weird headspace. A handful of us had gone for a walk in the adjacent woods at night and it was pitch black out. No lights. No cell phones to use as flashlights. Just the little red flares of the tips of their cigarettes. A silence fell among us. Our footsteps sounded loud on the gravel and fallen leaves. I began chattering, the way you do when you’re overly nervous about something. I spoke of how I was excited to be leaving for college in New York. Someplace full of lights and crowds and noise. Because I didn’t like it in the woods at night. My roommate’s voice crept out of the dark to reply that New York was full of the most frightening thing: people. Something about how she said it shut me up and left me lying awake in bed that night wondering if she was going to kill me in my sleep. (A very teenaged thought.)

That’s what this book reminded me of.

Fresh off a break-up with her jerk of a boyfriend, and disgusted by a violent attack that results from her advocation of a local wetland, wildlife biologist, Alex, accepts an assignment tracking wolverines at a land trust on an old ski resort in Montana.

Fresh air, quiet, solitude, the potential to study a rare animal. She’s hooked.

At first, Alex is excited to return to the mountains and delighted to meet a friendly neighbor who seems a little kooky: the neighbor warns Alex that bigfoot has been sighted in the area; and that the abandoned ski resort had been the hunting ground of a serial killer. Then someone leaves Alex a note warning her away, and someone else tries to run her off the road. And the local sheriff, hostile to the land trust, refuses to follow up on the traffic attack and warns Alex that, before the serial killer, the ski resort had been attacked by a spree killer.

So much for a nice peaceful assignment in the wild, away from the violence of people. Alex settles in to her study and begins to make progress, but then she begins seeing strange things in the wilderness. Things that can’t be blamed on hostile people. Could it be bigfoot after all?

The title, A Solitude of Wolverines, emerges when someone asks Alex what you call a group of wolverines – you know, like a pack of wolves, a murder of crows – and Alex explains that wolverines don’t come in groups; they live a solitary life. Hence, a solitude of wolverines. And solitude is what Alex is craving when she accepts this assignment.

And that is what drew me to this book: the idea of getting away from people, of going somewhere wild and clear, and studying a rare animal in the wild. I used to say that New Yorkers, in order to stay sane, have to get out of the city and go someplace completely different at least once a quarter. You have to get away from other people, from crowds and apartment neighbors, away from the constant noise, away from concrete and buildings and cars, away from work. Away.

Although studying animals in the wild – in the mountains of Montana – by yourself, in winter, sounds romantic, for me it’s just a safely distant fantasy. (See earlier posts about my experience with forest bathing.) But, when I read this, in late 2020, it had been too long since I had been out of the city and I thought this would give me that vicarious shot in the arm of wilderness solitude I was craving.

And, to some extent, it lives up to that promise. But it is also a surprisingly violent book. The first murders happen on page 10, when the ceremony celebrating the establishment of the wetland preservation is interrupted by a spree killer. And the violence keeps coming, keeps stalking Alex. The answer to the mysteries that Alex has been encountering – from the hostility of the locals to the suspicious departure of the previously assigned biologist to the bigfoot sightings – all have a single explanation. And it’s not bigfoot.

The author is not big on humans: selfish boyfriends, inane reporters, spree-killers, serial-killers, two-faced politicians, corrupt law enforcement, self-absorbed millionaires. How is a solitary wildlife biologist supposed to concentrate on wolverines?

I kind of wondered, reading this, how real wildlife biologists would view this situation. Wouldn’t they quit if they regularly found themselves at the wrong end of a gun in their everyday work? I wonder that a lot, reading mysteries. Often mysteries are populated with law enforcement representatives, private detectives, spies – or unofficial gadflies that seek out murders through some sense of duty (Miss Marple, Lord Peter Whimsey, Albert Campion, Gervase Fen, the Norths, Amelia Emerson, Miss Pinkerton).

But then there are the people who just get caught up in murder – wildlife biologists, caterers, bed-and-breakfast owners – people just going about their lives in what they assumed was a low-risk job that shouldn’t put them in danger but yet repeatedly does.

If it were me, I’d reconsider my professional choice.