The Guide by Peter Heller

Alfred A. Knopf 272 pp.

By Charlie Gofen

There’s more than trout below the surface of Peter Heller’s latest river thriller.

A young outdoorsman arrives at a remote Colorado fishing lodge to serve as a guide to wealthy clientele. Almost immediately, the high security and the unusual behavior of some of the guests set his Spidey senses tingling. A neighbor fires warning shots whenever anyone strays onto his property. And the staff are evasive when the new guide, Jack, asks questions like, why do you need a key code to leave the lodge, and what exactly happened to the guy he was hired to replace?

Heller offers a suspenseful story, and I won’t reveal any more of what may be going on at the lodge, but I will just note that Heller cleverly places The Guide three years into the COVID pandemic, which continues to plague the world. The virus plays into the novel in a few key ways, such as giving the lodge bosses an easy excuse for preventing guests from leaving the resort on account of an alleged breakout of the illness in a nearby town.

Heller’s lyrical prose and vivid descriptions of fly fishing in a pristine river are magnificent. When he writes of fishing, “It demanded full attention, which is its own version of joy,” he could have been describing the experience of reading a Peter Heller novel.

After wading knee deep in the icy water and working patiently to catch a trout early in the story, Jack releases her back to the river, and this is how Heller describes the encounter:

“She was a species of gold that no jeweler had ever encountered—deeper, darker, rich with tones that had depth like water. He talked to her the whole time, You’re all right, you’re all right, thank you, you beauty, almost as he had talked to himself at the shack, and he wet his left hand and cupped her belly gently and slipped the barbless hook from her lip and withdrew the net.

He crouched with the ice water to his hips and held her quietly into the current until half his body was numb. Held and held her who knew how long and watched her gills work, and she mostly floated free between his guiding fingers, and he felt the pulsing touch of her flanks as her tail worked and she idled. And then she wriggled hard and darted and he lost her shape to the green shadows of the stones.”

Heller introduced readers to Jack in his previous novel, The River, a tale of two friends’ perilous wilderness canoe trip in Canada, and the events of that book create a relevant backstory for how the traumatized outdoorsman ended up at this fishing lodge. Both novels are taut, 250-page thrillers in which Heller, a former contributing editor at Outside Magazine, combines beautiful, unhurried nature writing with occasional bursts of intense activity.

You don’t need to read The River to appreciate The Guide, but I highly recommend the earlier book. The River actually offers an added layer of complexity, as Jack and his companion struggle to survive a wildfire in addition to facing down some menacing folks.

In both novels, Jack proves skilled, resourceful, and hardy on the river, and, as an added bonus, he has a Dartmouth pedigree and can quote from memory the haikus of 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō.

Jack is also spiritually wounded from tragedies earlier in life for which he blames himself, and, as a consequence, he is driven to protect innocent people who are in danger, even when doing so puts his own life at risk.

Heller pairs Jack in The Guide with a famous singer visiting the fishing lodge who goes by the name Alison K. She may be the mentee in this relationship, but she turns out to be more than competent handling herself in rough terrain, and the two make a formidable pair.

Heller’s nature writing is sublime, but his dialogue is occasionally a bit too witty and clipped. I call this the Reacher Effect—when contemporary authors try to punch up their novels by making their characters sound like Lee Child’s protagonist, Army veteran Jack Reacher. As an example, Alison K tells Jack, “I heard an owl scream. One time. Owls usually repeat.”

Still, Heller, influenced by Joseph Conrad and Jack London, has proven again that he is one of the finest writers of the literary thriller. Perhaps a sprinkle of Reacher adds some zest to the recipe for the modern reader.

Charlie Gofen is an investment counselor in Chicago who has taught high school and been a newspaper reporter.