The Naturalist

Theo Cray is a professor of computational biology, a man who spends his days among digital code and microbes and who is practiced at finding patterns in what looks like chaos. He has no forensic training. A field trip to Montana puts him in the middle of a murder inquiry anyway, when one of his former students is killed in a savage attack.

Mutilated bodies turn up deep in the Montana woods, and the local police have no clear leads. Theo notices something about the killings that they have overlooked, a detail that strikes him as unnatural. As the number of victims grows and more evidence comes in, the investigators settle on two possible culprits: a grizzly bear that has turned rogue, or Theo himself.

With the police closing in on him, Theo has to stay ahead of them while he works out what is really killing people in the forest. His only tools are his scientific training and his habit of reading patterns. He has to think like the predator he is hunting, or he becomes its next target.

This is a thriller that mixes a murder investigation with a scientist's methods, and its amateur protagonist is under suspicion from the start. The wilderness setting and the pursuit on two fronts, by the killer and by the law, keep the tension high.