Recommended Reading

Peter Heller’s previous novel, The River, moved as swiftly and eventfully as Class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will likely salve. It opens three years after The River, when Jack, a young Colorado rancher and guide, takes a last-minute gig at an ultra-exclusive fly-fishing lodge near Crested Butte. Spinning with grief, he’s hoping for healing, or at least distraction, but finds trouble the moment he drives up the narrow canyon. The property is bordered, his irritable manager warns, by one neighbor who shoots at interlopers and another whose dogs killed a trespassing angler. Heller, a fly fisherman himself,