This weekend, I was traveling so I read two new books. Okay, 2.5 but the third one is 300+ pages and is on the topic of the history of the origins of language. More on that later.

I was really looking forward to reading these two books, which were both released over the summer and are each the latest in a series that I discovered around the same time and have been enjoying. I’ve been trying to get into the TV Series, Tracker, which intrigued me because it shared some things that I like to read about: missing persons; the skill of tracking lost people; the mystery of what causes people to disappear in the woods. The TV show hasn’t hooked me yet (I’ve heard they made some changes to the second season that will either improve or ruin the series, but I haven’t gotten that far with it) but, when I stumbled on these series soon after discovering the TV show, I started reading them and liked each of them.

I had noticed, as I read the earlier books in these two series, some similar themes. But after reading these two, latest books, I felt compelled to discuss them in the same post.

And wonder… how does this happen?

An Unforgiving Place by Claire Kells

This series follows a female main character, who had been an FBI agent until she broke her back and lost her husband in a hiking accident. (Literally, lost him: he went off to get help and never returned, presumed dead although I suspect the author could resurrect him in a future book.) She is now working as an agent in the Investigative Services Branch of the National Park Service.

I’m not sure what this branch does in real life – in this series, the character seems to get called when they find dead bodies on NPS land, that seem to have not been killed by animals or obvious accidents (such as falling off a cliff). She does some investigative work and liaises with the FBI, Park Rangers, and local law enforcement. She also seems to be at the mercy of her boss, who regularly tells her to wrap up a case just as it gets interesting, so he can send her off to some other crime scene.

The main character is good at the investigative stuff but isn’t very experienced at the outdoor survival; so she has an assistant, a former Navy Seal, who is very good at surviving in the wild, hunting, hand to hand combat, sniper skills, and can hike vast distances in a single day. I think, in an earlier book, he may have been a park ranger or something (can’t remember or be bothered to look it up) – but you get the idea.

In this book, a husband and wife couple in their 30s has been found by (or rather, just in) a river in Alaska – not in Denali, in some other, more remote park. It’s unclear what killed them at first, what brought them to Alaska, or why they were in that specific location when they told the local bush pilot that they were going somewhere else entirely.

Felicity (main character) and Hux (assistant) begin poking around and realize that the couple came to Alaska to get pregnant, which they had been trying to do back home without success owing to a sperm problem. Felicity and Hux follow the couple’s footsteps through the wilderness and discover a camp relatively nearby, with another couple also trying to conceive, and a strange survivalist guy who is promising to help them. Felicity and Hux immediately go undercover to try to make a connection.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, in case you want to read it, but I will state that the rest of the book includes an aggressive Grizzly Bear; Felicity and Hux finding themselves stranded along a remote waterway thanks to the culprit(s); Hux getting injured and Felicity having to take charge, although being the less-skilled of the two in outdoor survival; and an autumn rainstorm that involves wind, sleet, and hypothermia, that almost kills them.

Thoroughly enjoyable if you enjoy this sort of thing.

Spirit Lake by David Barbour

This series follows a male main character, an outdoorsman and tracker, highly skilled in hunting, gathering, hand to hand combat, sniper skills, and can hike vast distances in a single day. He would be very happy living off the grid.

And, in fact, he and his girlfriend have been enjoying a week off the grid in a remote area of Alaska, which they bush-planed into. She is a children’s librarian with a strange set of skills that include advanced computer skills, including hacking into secured databases, and – we learn in this book – the ability to tell if she’s being trailed and shaking the tail. In this book we learn that she was training to join the CIA but left before she got to the part where you learn to survive in the wild. Luckily her boyfriend has been training her on those skills

because she finds herself in charge when their bush plane home gets sabotaged by the bad guys and crashes into a lake, her boyfriend gets injured, and she finds herself responsible for a) getting him to shore; b) getting some kind of shelter and a fire; c) finding food for them; d) figuring out how to get him to a safe location and – eventually – get them rescued.

Their adventures include (among other things), an aggressive Grizzly Bear; Katie (the girlfriend) and Tye (the tracker) finding themselves stranded along a remote waterway thanks to the culprit(s); Tye getting injured and Katie having to take charge, although being the less-skilled of the two in outdoor survival; an autumn rainstorm that involves wind, sleet, and hypothermia, that almost kills them.

A completely enjoyable book if you like this kind of thing.

Hm. Wait a minute here.

The odd thing is, these are two completely different books. The mysteries are different and the characters are different (aside from the main characters’ surface similarities). The bad guys are different and have completely different motivations for their crimes.

I almost wouldn’t say that Spirit Lake is a mystery, per se. There’s a strong mysticism involved, and the mystery is more about where is the sacred thing that the bad guys are looking for. (And, for me, how the heck Tye can hike all that distance up a mountain with a busted knee and a concussion.)

An Unforgiving Place falls squarely in the mystery category (the jacket calls it a “police procedural” but I’m not sure I’d agree with that characterization), although the author seemed to be veering towards romantic overtones between her main characters, though she sheers off by the end of the book.

The odd thing is the common elements: the bear, the storms, the role of the bush plane, the strong male character getting injured and the less-experienced female character having to save his life in a life-threatening storm. Were the two authors reading the same Wikipedia page about Alaska and then weaving the most prominent elements into their books? They didn’t have the same editor (I checked: different publishers). And I don’t remember Kate Shugak – Dana Stabenow’s awesome Alaskan PI – facing all of these things in a single book. In different books now….

You know, it’s been a while since I’ve read that series. I’d better start at the beginning and read through them again, just in case I’m wrong. (Although the last book made me so mad that I swore that I wouldn’t – there have got to be better ways to tell your publisher that you’re done with your series than that.)

It’s funny how these coincidences happen. You see it from time to time, especially in the genres. Think about Tanya Huff’s Bloodline series, Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde Investigations, and Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. (We could probably toss some of the early Elizabeth Peter’s one-off novels like Night of 400 Rabbits into the mix, although maybe not, better go back and re-read that one, too.) All very similar themes going on – if I described the main themes, you might assume the authors were comparing notes – but very different books.

Something in the ether perhaps, a crack in the zeitgeist…

As an author, you sometimes are working on something and then read the summary of a book or a movie and get disgusted, toss your drafts out – someone has already done it, what hope do you have?

But these examples provide proof that your work doesn’t have to be completely unique to be successful.