A thick blanket of snow seems to suffocate not only Bolton but the story itself. All flicker and murmur and illusion.īook #14 in the Reacher canon, 61 Hours, unfolds in a town called “Bolton,” a place bolted shut by a blizzard. I thought it was perfect-and that French had given us fair warning. A slew of readers protested the story’s cryptic ending. When we finally meet the story’s villain, one of the creepiest sociopaths you’ll ever read, we get the queasy sense we’ve just come face to face with the forest itself, or its human incarnation. The dark Irish forest that opens the story hovers over it throughout, “all flicker and murmur and illusion … its silence a pointillist conspiracy.” Within a handful of pages we move to an archeological dig where the forest used to be, and from there into town and civilization-but the hero never really leaves the woods, and neither do we. I (like a few billion others) got hooked on Tana French in the first few pages of her debut novel, In the Woods. Du Maurier’s malevolent Manderley, Stephen King’s accursed Overlook Hotel, or the brooding moor in The Hound of the Baskervilles. What really got my attention, though, were certain stories in which very specific environments became something more-not simply expressions of their hero’s persona, but full-throated characters in their own right. The heroes’ worldviews in these books were so tightly wrapped up in their environments, it was impossible to imagine them being transplanted anywhere else. James Lee Burke’s lush, lyrical, fallen Louisiana. When I fell in love with crime fiction, one of the first things I noticed was how crime writers love to evoke an exceptionally rich sense of place.