At the height of the Cold War, a twin-engine Beechcraft bearing top-secret cargo departs from the Santa Paula Airport near Los Angeles and disappears into a blinding rainstorm. Six decades later, on a flight over the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California, flight instructor and former military assassin Cordell Logan discovers what appears to be aircraft wreckage strewn on a remote, all-but-inaccessible, alpine hillside. His life as he knows it will never be the same.
Logan and his beautiful ex-wife Savannah have planned a weekend getaway in the ski resort of Lake Tahoe. But upon landing in the Ruptured Duck, his aging Cessna, Logan agrees to put those plans on hold to help lead a sheriff’s search and rescue team to the mountainous crash site. The team finds the long-missing airplane with the mummified remains of its pilot still at the controls, along with something much more recent and far more sinister: the body of a local young man, apparently shot to death only hours earlier. Someone has beaten the rescuers to the site to salvage the plane’s mysterious cargo and will clearly do whatever it takes to profit from it– including kidnapping and threatening to kill Savannah if Logan refuses to help them carry out their illicit plans.
With the clock ticking and the love of his life in jeopardy, Logan finds himself drawn into a pulse-pounding whirlwind of a mystery as dangerous as any he had ever known.
“The tension-packed plot and the fine prose, including well-drawn characters and vivid portraits of the natural landscape, are just what fans have come to expect from this author.”
—-Bruce DeSilva, the Associated Press
“Freed has a serious surprise in store for the reader this time, and he skillfully builds up to the shocker. The unusual pilot- sleuth premise, the jaunty style, and the genuine suspense combine to make this one a thoroughly entertaining installment in what has become a fine series.”
–Booklist
“This is…an economically told thriller which makes the simplicity of a linear plot a delight to watch. The tension is skillfully maintained as we watch Cordell’s sense of duty collide with his love for his ex-wife….My delight in Voodoo ridge is not saying I want all my books to be grim, but there does come a point when the endless sunlight of modern fiction becomes tiring and a healthy dose of reality is appreciated. If you enjoy thrillers with a darker edge, this is a superb example of the form and you should snap it up.”
–Thinking About Books