The River - Peter Heller

Written by Peter Heller
Read by Mark Deakins
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Release date: March 5, 2019
Duration: 07:20:04

A Nominee for the 2020 Edgar Allan Poe Awards

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing.

When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman?

From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.

“Narrator Mark Deakins and author Peter Heller are an audiobook lover’s dream team. In this suspenseful novel, a late-summer canoe trip in Canada goes horribly wrong for two college friends despite their being well prepared and lifelong outdoorsmen. Early in the audiobook, Deakins sets a light tone and an easy pace, matching Wynn and Jack’s comfortable friendship and their obvious passion for nature, camping, and fly-fishing. Later, as a forest fire grows closer and other canoe group display puzzling behavior, Deakins builds a foreboding atmosphere, adding tension, uncertainty, and fear to the men’s voices and thoughts. Throughout, he enhances the narrative with an underlayer of subtle drama. Like making the perfect cast to a rising trout, Deakins’s performance entices listeners, and they can’t resist the bait.”— Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award