Synopsis:
The Cold Creek Highway stretches close to five hundred miles through British Columbia’s rugged wilderness to the west coast. Isolated and vast, it has become a prime hunting ground for predators. For decades, young women traveling the road have gone missing. Motorists and hitchhikers, those passing through or living in one of the small towns scattered along the region have fallen prey time and again.
No killer or abductor who has stalked the highway has ever been brought to justice.
Hailey McBride calls Cold Creek home. Her father taught her to respect nature, how to live and survive off the land, and to never travel the highway alone. But now he’s gone and she is a teenage orphan in the care of her aunt whose police sergeant husband, Vaughn, uses his badge as a license to bully and control Hailey. Overwhelmed by grief and forbidden to work, socialize, or date, Hailey vanishes into the mountainous terrain, hoping everyone will believe she’s left town. But rumors spread that she was taken by the highway killer — who has actually claimed yet another victim over the summer.
One year later, Beth Chevalier arrives in Cold Creek. Her sister, Amber, lived there briefly — before she was murdered, her body dumped in a roadside ditch. Estranged from her parents and seeking answers that will bring closure, Beth takes a job as a waitress in the same local diner as Amber did. Beth is desperate to understand what happened to her sister . . . and why.
But Beth’s search for answers puts a target on her back . . . and threatens to reveal the truth behind Hailey’s disappearance.
Review:
Author Chevy Stevens has published seven novels, including Still Missing, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel;That Night; Those Girls; and Never Let You Go. A native of Vancouver Island, where she still resides, she worked as a giftware company representative and realtor. It was in that capacity that inspiration struck. She had a terrifying idea that served as the basis for Still Missing, compelling her to sell her house and leave her real estate career behind in order to focus on writing.
Stevens says that as a general rule, she tries not to be influenced by actual events, preferring to craft stories from her own imagination. But Dark Roads is an exception and proved to be the most difficult book for her to write thus far. The story was inspired by a series of crimes Stevens found so “disturbing” that the events lingered in her mind for years. Situated in Northern British Columbia, the Highway of Tears is where “women have been murdered or gone missing since the 1970s.” While growing up in the area, the road served as a reminder to Stevens of the danger inherent in traveling alone in a remote location and a deterrent to hitchhiking. Most of the crimes remain unsolved. For Stevens, “the image of a desolate road haunted by the lost souls of women, searching for answers to their deaths, stuck with me.”
As a show of respect to the victims, their families, and the law enforcement personnel still working to bring their kidnappers and murderers to justice, Stevens concocted the fictional town of Cold Creek. Near the Cold Creek Highway is a campground adjacent to a lake, surrounded by a dense and mountainous forest. Her characters and the events depicted in Dark Roads are all products of her imagination, as well. However, as with the Highway of Tears, Stevens made more than half of the young women who have disappeared along the five-hundred-mile, expansive Cold Creek Highway First Nations women in recognition of the fact that “Indigenous women experience a disproportionately higher rate of violence and homicide than the average woman in Canada.” Along the highway outside the small town of Cold Creek a billboard displays the names and photos of the victims, as well as a stern warning to women not to hitchhike. Some people think Cold Creek is haunted. It is undeniably “the last real stop for gas and provisions before taking your chances on the dark road ahead. It is also the last place several women had been seen.”
The story opens in June 2018 with Hailey McBride mourning her beloved father who was killed in a single vehicle crash. She now must live with her aunt Lana, her cousin, six-year-old Cash, and Lana’s boorish husband, Erick Vaughn, a local police sergeant. Hailey’s father taught her all about nature: hunting, fishing, food preparation, and survival in keeping with First Nations ways. He served as a wilderness guide for many years, and was well-known and respected in the community. In a compelling first-person narrative, Hailey laments, “He’d outsmarted cougars, bull moose, and grizzlies, and once nearly froze to death in a snowstorm, but survived it all, only to die on a hairpin curve.”
Vaughn watches Hailey’s every move and insists that she must spend the summer babysitting Cash when what she really wants to do is get a part-time job working at the local diner. He warns her that she cannot participate in any parties or make any trips to the lake unless she is accompanied by Lana or Vaughn, and if she disobeys him, he will confiscate her mountain bike which is her only means of transportation. Vaughn is convinced that Hailey’s best friend, Jonny, is responsible for a string of recent thefts of dirt bike parts. Jonny is a talented biker who performs repairs and has the chance to compete professionally.
Hailey quickly realizes that Vaughn is a man with dark secrets, engaged in activities that he would not want Lana or anyone to know about. But when she investigates and discovers what he has been doing — without her knowledge or consent — she is revolted, outraged, and frightened because Vaughn wields power in Cold Creek. Worse, he skillfully thwarts her efforts to bring his conduct to light. Despondent, she cannot bring herself to continue living in the same house with him, especially after he sullies the “best thing in my life, the truest thing” and threatens Jonny’s future. She convinces Jonny to help her hide deep in the forest. “I had to stay off the grid. Where no one would ever find me. I would live in the woods until I was of age. . . . The mountain would protect me. Dad had been preparing me since I was little.”
And, in fact, Hailey feels the darkness that has shrouded her begin to lift as she makes a home for herself in the forest. A stray dog she names Wolf becomes her companion, and she secretly communicates with Jonny. “I hadn’t realized how trapped I’d felt in town, the noises, the people, everyone’s obsession with social media.” Alone in the woods, Hailey develops a sense of belonging, although she misses Jonny and Amber, the alluring waitress at the diner she was just getting to know when she found it necessary to leave. Stevens credibly portrays the means Hailey employs to survive and how she escapes danger more than once.
But tragedy strikes and Hailey again sustains an unimaginable loss. She is convinced that Vaughn abducted and murdered at least one prior Cold Creek Highway victim, and when Amber becomes the latest young woman to lose her life, Hailey is devastated and determined to see that Vaughn is punished for his crimes. But how, given that Hailey herself is believed to be one of the victims?
Amber was on her way to a music festival in the Yukon when she stopped for gas in Cold Creek and ended up staying. She spoke of Hailey to her sister, Beth, asking for prayers that Hailey is found safe. She tells Beth that she hates it in Cold Creek and might move on during their last conversation. Amber had no interest in returning to the family home where the girls’ parents insisted that they attend church and refused to accept Amber’s life choices. Beth has just begun an internship with a law firm and is planning to start law school in the fall when Amber’s murder completely derails her life plan. She loses her job and her apartment, and makes her way to Cold Creek in search of answers. She winds up working as a waitress at the same diner where Amber was employed by the owner, Mason. She is taking pills and drinking too much, and has not told her parents the truth about her circumstances. Employing a third-person narrative, Stevens compassionately conveys Beth’s struggle to find answers about what really happened to the sister who “had been her voice. Maybe that was why she had felt so weightless since she’d died. Unanchored. Lost.” She ends up sleeping in her car at the campground by the lake and getting involved with Jonny, but she isn’t prepared for what she eventually experiences in Cold Creek.
Dark Roads is full of surprising plot twists and revelations. The fast-paced story is engrossing and Stevens has crafted sympathetic characters, especially Beth who, unlike Hailey, is not equipped to function in the forest. Despite her previous career ambitions, she is not particularly adept at investigating Amber’s death, either. She finds herself in extreme danger once Stevens reveals the identity of Amber’s killer.
As the story screeches toward the revelation of the truth, Stevens accelerates its pace. She injects pulse-pounding confrontations and shocking developments as Hailey and Beth realize that they must work together in order to stay alive. Stevens’ writing is lush and atmospheric, with the dark, dank forest serving as an inanimate but critical character in the story. Each of her characters is fully imagined and she eloquently illustrates the ways in which their relationships have caused them pain and loss leading to their present predicaments.
Equally engaging is their journey to discovering their own resilience and determination, refusing to surrender to the impact their sorrowful experiences have had upon them. Both Hailey and Beth must face their feelings in order to move forward with their lives. Hailey prefers to evade her emotions, attempting to avoid detailing everything that she has endured in order to see justice served, observing that “talking meant feelings.” She would rather simply move on. Beth recognizes that she must tell the full truth in order to find peace and create a meaningful life for herself.
Dark Roads is a tautly constructed, believable, and cleverly named tale. Both Hailey and Beth travel very dark roads — literally in and around the little town of Cold Creek, as well as figuratively as they navigate the emotional toll of their respective experiences. Stevens supplies a satisfying conclusion to her hauntingly entertaining thriller.
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