UNTAMED COAST, historical mystery set in Alaska

UNTAMED COAST
KEVIN C. MORRIS
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A late-night mayday call drives a grieving man to embark on an unexpected journey along the wild Alaskan coast, unraveling a decades-old mystery of stolen gold, missing women, and murder in this atmospheric and propulsive debut novel.

After the loss of his wife, Marconi Franco is content drifting alone on his boat through the isolated waters of Southeast Alaska with no real destination in mind. But when a mysterious distress signal cuts through the static on his radio one sleepless night, Marco feels an overwhelming pull to help the woman whose plea he heard—a pull he can't explain or ignore.

His search for the missing woman draws him to Radioville, an abandoned 1930s communication outpost now decaying on an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. There, Marco begins uncovering fragments of a story long a Depression-era theft, a shattered marriage, and a disturbing pattern of disappearances. As he sifts through the past, his own grief starts to mirror the tragedies that echo across decades, and his search draws the attention of someone determined to keep the truth buried.

Told across three evocative timelines—a radio operator in 1938 collecting more than just telegrams, a young woman in the 1980s fighting to survive her abusive husband, and Marco in the present day searching for a voice in the static—Untamed Coast is a story of fierce determination, missed signals, loneliness and connection, and the unseen ripples that reverberate across generations, standing the test of time and the tides.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Marconi Franco" is one of the most nominative-determinist monikers I've run across in fiction. I think Author Morris took a big swing with it, making Marconi the center of the 2017 timeline, and could've whiffed on it very badly...and didn't. That's skill, sure, but even more luck as he's a debut author. I can readily see ten ways he could've fumbled such a "joke" but Marco never becomes a one-liner in a narrative that splits among grieving Marco who misses his late wife Michelle; Anya from 1982, struggling to survive marital abuse in a remote, isolated life fishing with her husbeast; and in 1938, there's gold-struck Joe Baxter in Radioville, a communication outpost who helps isolated prospectors stay alive while scheming how to get rich.

Yes, it's the radio that connects them all. As that oddness in the spacetime continuum plays out, though, Author Morris evokes immersively the bleak, spare beauty of maritime Southern Alaska, allowing readers to really *get* what it is that binds these characters to the life they've each chosen in harsh, unstable conditions.

The mystery of what connects the lives of each character is well-handled. It's always a danger to think in "supernatural" terms, and never moreso than when characters exist in separate timelines. In maritime Southern Alaska, there are a lot of details to survival in a really complicated dance of detailed actions, dangerous situations that have changed very very little in a long time, and thus things in concrete reality that have commonality among Marco, Anya, and Joe. I wouldn't call this a thriller, though there are moments throughout the stories that do indeed cause intense responses; I'd say it's a suspense novel because even in the not-thrilling moments, there are deeply drawn scenes of uneasy peace that feels unlike rest, there are oddball, off-kilter moments that point your attention irresistible *there* and away from *here*...lots of thought went into how to keep your reading finger turning pages.

If no one gives this book to Alan Ritchson's first-look company (he must have one, Reacher's such a success) to develop into a limited series for Prime, it will be a shame. He'd *slay* as Marco. Or Joe, if he prefers. (Not Anya, though.)