Desolation Mountain

Stephen O'Connor has visions, and the one that will not leave him is of a great bird shot out of the sky and a terrible sense of loss. Then a private plane carrying a United States senator and her family comes down on Desolation Mountain, on the edge of the Iron Lake Reservation.

Stephen and his father Cork reach the wreck before the federal teams do. What follows is not an investigation but a lockout — evidence removed, witnesses silenced, first responders vanishing — and the arrival of Bo Thorson, a private security consultant working for clients he will not name.

Desolation Mountain is the seventeenth Cork O'Connor novel, and the most conspiratorial: a book about what happens when the machinery of the state decides a crash was an accident before anyone has looked at it.