The book’s main character, retired FBI agent, Luke Chamberlin, is hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Part way up the trail, an urgent message from a stranger indicates that trouble lies ahead near the border with Canada. Luke sets aside his unwillingness to get involved, and puts together a renegade team of law enforcement officers to check it out. At Harts Pass, high in the Cascade Mountains, the team finds more than they bargained for. They organize a plan to stop a group of extremists determined to destroy a target on the West Coast. But not before Luke puts the operation, and everything he stands for, in jeopardy.
Ms. Macalaster began her writing career as a science journalist. Married to an FBI agent, Elizabeth and their two children moved all over the United States as her husband transferred from post to post working in counterintelligence and counterterrorism programs. She’s written a number of award-winning children’s nonfiction books with another author under the pen name, Ryan Ann Hunter, including In Disguise! Undercover With Real Women Spies (Beyond Words/Aladdin, 2013), a collection of stories about women in espionage. Her experience and inside track to the FBI, as well as her passion for hiking and its rewards, inspired her to write Reckoning at Harts Pass, her first novel. She and her husband share their time between Vermont and Maine where they are avid rowers and hikers.
Mr. Sayner served as the technical editor for Reckoning At Harts Pass. He spent 21 years as an FBI agent working mostly in counterterrorism and counterintelligence areas. He worked on a number of espionage and terrorism cases including: the 1986 Gennady Zakharov spy case, which nearly derailed the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik ; the 1993 World Trade Centers bombing; the 1994 Unabomber case; the 1998 Peter Lee spy case; and the 2003 Katrina Leung double agent case. He retired in 2004 and that year, hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail.
The talk will set your heart pounding—and not just from high altitudes. It will take you behind the scenes of the FBI and leave you wanting more.
