In #1 New York Times bestseller Kelley Armstrong’s latest thriller, the hidden town of Rockton is about to face a challenge none of them saw coming: a baby.

Every season in Rockton seems to bring a new challenge. At least that’s what Detective Casey Duncan has felt since she decided to call this place home. Between all the secretive residents, the sometimes-hostile settlers outside, and the surrounding wilderness, there’s always something to worry about.

While on a much needed camping vacation with her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, Casey hears a baby crying in the woods. The sound leads them to a tragic scene: a woman buried under the snow, murdered, a baby still alive in her arms.

A town that doesn’t let anyone in under the age of eighteen, Rockton must take care of its youngest resident yet while solving another murder and finding out where the baby came from – and whether she’s better off where she is.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong again delivers an engaging, tense thriller set in perhaps the most interesting town in all of contemporary crime fiction.

I’m completely hooked on the Rockton series by Kelley Armstrong, and waited less than a month after finishing book 4, Watcher in the Woods, before diving back in with the 5th book, Alone in the Wild. Needless to say, book #5 provided yet another immersive, exciting reading experience — I couldn’t put it down!

Once again, a quick recap of the series premise:

Rockton is a secret hidden town in the Yukon wilderness, a haven for those seeking extreme shelter from dangers in their real lives — or those who’ve committed some sort of wrongdoing and need a place to start over. Rockton, population 200, is filled with an uneasy mix of crime victims and white-collar criminals — although as Sheriff Eric Dalton and Detective Casey Butler come to discover, the town council is willing to defy its own rules for a price and allow more dangerous people to take advantage of Rockton’s protection.

Alone in the Wild picks up the story about six months after the events of the previous books. Casey and Eric are taking a much-needed vacation from their policing duties in Rockton, enjoying a couple of nights of camping out in the wild, when Casey hears an unexpected sound: a baby crying. She makes a disturbing discovery: a dead woman cradling a living baby, both buried under the fresh snow. The death is obviously very recent, but there’s no time to investigate — the baby is alive, but barely; Casey and Eric rush the baby back to Rockton for immediate medical care before returning to the corpse to look for clues.

Their primary focus is identifying the baby, a girl who appears to be about a month old. From examining the dead woman, it’s clear that she is not the mother of the child… and it’s also clear that she’s been murdered. While crimes not related to the residents of Rockton are outside Casey and Eric’s jurisdiction, they realize that solving this woman’s murder might lead them to the baby’s family, and their priority is returning her to her rightful parents, if they can be found.

Meanwhile, Casey and Eric become the baby’s de facto foster parents, with the help of the rest of Rockton, raising important questions for them as a couple. Due to serious injuries sustained during a life-changing attack in her teens, Casey doesn’t know whether she’ll ever be able to carry a pregnancy to term. Caring for the baby forces Casey and Eric to discuss whether they could see themselves as parents, and what it might mean for them as a couple. Meanwhile, concerns about whether the baby’s parents are capable of raising her bring up uncomfortable memories from Eric’s own past. The complicated emotions brought on by confronting these issues move Eric and Casey’s relationship forward in important ways.

Of course, the investigation itself is fascinating, as it involves venturing far beyond Rockton’s borders and making contact with settler communities who abide by very different rules, beliefs, and ethical standards. This broadens the world of the series in new and interesting ways, and I’m sure will have important implications in future books.