White Tide Rising

In 1973, at seventeen, Mia ran away from her California home to join her first true love in the wilderness of Big Sky, Montana. Wearing her brother's Vietnam-era Army jacket, with seven dollars stuffed into its pockets, she hitchhiked north after receiving a postcard inviting her to come.

The romance didn't survive the first snowfall. Mia found herself spending a harsh Montana winter alone in a one-room log cabin in remote Gallatin Canyon, north of Yellowstone, at an old stagecoach stop called Karst Ranch.

At the tiny ranch bar, she became acquainted with families who described themselves as survivalists. Some of the men chopped wood for her and made sure the seventeen-year-old living alone had what she needed to survive the winter. Yet Mia would later learn disturbing things about the beliefs and associations of people within that world. Equally unforgettable were the young wives she met and the stories they shared about arranged marriages and life inside an insular culture governed by men.

Nearly twenty years later, two young friends of Mia's daughter disappeared after school. Their abduction, the ensuing search and FBI interviews shook the community and haunted Mia for months. Hoping national attention might help bring them home, she contacted John Walsh's America's Most Wanted, which subsequently featured the children's disappearance. Tragically, they were later found deceased.

Years passed, but Mia never entirely escaped the memory of those children or the young women she had encountered during that long-ago Montana winter.

Then one night she had an extraordinarily vivid dream.

In it, the missing children hadn't died. They had survived. Somehow, impossibly, they were living in the Montana wilderness among the people she had known at seventeen.

That dream brought together two experiences separated by decades and became the seed of White Tide Rising.

The novel that eventually emerged is fiction. But beneath its imagined characters, conspiracies and dangers lie memories that are very real: a seventeen-year-old girl alone in the Montana wilderness; women living within a world she struggled to understand; two children who never came home; and a dream that, if only for a night, gave them another ending.

Perhaps White Tide Rising became Mia's way of reconciling those memories by imagining a different destiny for children who were lost, and a voice for women she never forgot.