The northern wilderness doesn't forgive mistakes. David Carrigan knows this, a Mounted Police sergeant riding alone into the Flaming Forest to bring in Black Roger Audemard, a man whose name makes hardened trappers cross themselves. The forest is supposed to be his weapon: miles of trackless pine, frozen rivers, and silence so deep it hums. But when a bullet takes him from the saddle, Carrigan discovers that survival in this country demands more than knowing how to shoot and track. The woman who pulls him from the snow is Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain, and she is no ordinary outlaw's moll. She has her own reasons, her own past, and they are the dangerous kind. When she binds his wounds instead of finishing what her rifle started, Carrigan faces an impossible question: can he trust the woman who shot him? The Flaming Forest burns through their story like a fever, trapping them together in a landscape where the cold kills as surely as any bullet. Curwood writes the north as if he lived inside it, harsh, beautiful, and utterly without mercy. This is adventure at its most primal: survival, betrayal, and the strange salvation that comes from the most dangerous hands.
