The exciting life of a biologist

Who knew being a biologist could be so dangerous?

In Alice Henderson's first Alex Carter adventure, A Solitude of Wolverines (2020), the young biologist is targeted by a crazed gunman in Boston and then takes a job counting wolverines in the Montana Rockies, where an entire gang of ruthless men are soon trying to kill her.

Alex has incredible survival skills and can best any man she faces in hand-to-hand combat, yet unlike those wolverines she tracks, she is not entirely alone. Some unknown man, it turns out, has been tracking her, saving her life first in Boston, then later in Montana. Who is he? Henderson leaves that as a cliffhanger to entice us into her second novel, A Blizzard of Polar Bears.

Wolverines tells us much about wildlife and the need to protect it, but mostly this is a thriller from beginning to end. The pace encourages fast reading, and if you read it quickly enough you may not notice that much of it makes no sense at all. For example, a man takes Alex's journal out of her backpack and reads it — in the dark. Alex can hear a conversation word for word at a distance — during a snowstorm. Even the plot itself sometimes stretches credulity. 

Still, it is fun.