Don’t miss this book! “A Ghost of Caribou”

Here’s my interview with author, Alice Henderson

A couple weeks ago, I started reading a book one night and stopped at 4 a.m. only because I knew that if I kept reading, I would soon hear the birds chirping and completely lose a night’s sleep. The book is “A Ghost of Caribou,” by Alice Henderson, and it’s a riveting thriller. I came across a review of it in a Nature Conservancy publication, and thought it worth a look. It sure was.

A mystery with an environmental twist, this “novel of suspense” (as the book cover states) is set in current day Washington State. The female protagonist, Alex Carter, is a wildlife biologist, who, I would say, is a female version of MacGyver, maybe crossed with Indiana Jones. 

In this third novel of the Carter series, she heads to a wildlife sanctuary in Washington on assignment for a conservation organization to confirm whether a mountain caribou has been spotted there. This would be quite a finding since the caribou, referred to as “gray ghosts of the forest,” went extinct in the lower 48 states in 2019, with the last few remaining caribou brought to Canada. This part is true.

According to the Spokesman-Review,

The species has been in decline for decades… Habitat degradation from old-growth logging, climate change and increased predation has decimated the species.

What happens when she gets there is a fast-paced story that involves a missing hiker, lights in the sky that seem a lot like UFOs, a dead body, and Carter going up against the logging establishment, while staying alive. To say more would spoil it.

Aside from the action that gets going early on, “Caribou” weaves the whodunit with detailed descriptions of the forest that reveal the author’s love for the wild. The writing is so good, you really lose yourself in the story. And then all the threads running through the novel come together neatly at the end to wrap it up.

What I enjoyed most is that Henderson has created an independent female hero, a survivalist who is unafraid and willing to take on challenges alone. And she beats them. I’ve already gone back to the first of this series, “A Solitude of Wolverines,” but this time, I started it on a rainy morning and finished by dinner. Clearly, another winner. The books do work independently. She has written other novels as well.

When she's not writing, this dedicated wildlife researcher surveys conservation lands to determine which species are present. Her two degrees are a mix of the arts and sciences. She has an interdisciplinary master's degree with studies in geographic information systems (GIS), folklore, writing and climatology, and her undergrad has studies in creative writing, geology, biogeography and field zoology.

I contacted Henderson and had the opportunity to ask her a few questions so we could get to know her a bit better.

Q. How much of Alex Carter is based on Alice Henderson?

A. Alex and I have a few things in common. We are both wildlife researchers and both feel passionately about helping imperiled species. But she really took on a life of her own as I started writing these books and creating her backstory, which is quite different from my own. Her mother was a fighter pilot for the Air Force and taught Alex survival skills, and growing up, Alex lived all over the world.

Q. The book jacket states you have surveyed for the presence of grizzlies, wolves, wolverines, jaguars, endangered bats, and more. Are you as alone in the wild as Carter is?

A. I do solo work, yes. But I am also often joined by my best friend, an incredible wildlife photographer. We've documented a lot of species in the U.S. and Canada. I set up bioacoustic recorders to record wildlife, using an ultrasonic microphone to document bats and a regular microphone to detect audible species such as birds, wolves and amphibians. We walk transects and look for tracks and other spoor. My bestie sets up remote cameras, and we've even made a couple of short documentaries using footage we've shot in the field.

Q. You get Carter out of a lot of scrappy situations. How did you learn all the mechanical details to work her out of the close calls she faces?

A. I love working on cars and building things, and I've been learning how to do that sort of thing for many years. I’ve fixed my own cars, know how to weld, built a radio telescope so that I could listen to storms on Jupiter, and more. I love working technical details into the narrative, and having Alex be a resourceful character. When devising a situation that Alex needs to get out of, I think about what resources she has at hand, and let my imagination fly.

Q. “A Ghost of Caribou” is the third in the Alex Carter series. Did you have all these novels set in your mind before you started writing your first? When can we expect the next one?

A. While I did have a series in mind when I wrote “A Solitude of Wolverines,” the first Alex Carter book, I didn't know specifically what species I would cover in the following books. I knew that I wanted to address the plight of species who were in a dangerous decline. When I got the idea for the first book, I was on a remote sanctuary in Montana searching for wolves and wolverines. Since there are only about 300 wolverines left in the contiguous U.S., I knew I wanted to shed light on their situation.

Polar bears were the next species I chose, as they are very much in danger of vanishing, so I chose “A Blizzard of Polar Bears” for the second book.

And we actually lost our last mountain caribou in the lower 48 in 2019, so I set out to address that in “A Ghost of Caribou.”

The fourth book in the series, which is about jaguars and is set in New Mexico, will be out in March 2025. There are only a handful of jaguars left in the U.S.

Q. How did you fall in love with the environment, and did something specific make you decide to become an activist for this cause?

A. I've always loved wildlife, and have been enchanted with nature since I was a kid. My parents would take us on these epic summer camping trips across the U.S. and Canada, and I would learn all about the different wildlife and plants along the way. I kept a nature sketch journal and read tons of books on animals. Then when I was six, I learned what extinction was, and it wasn't just something happening millions of years ago to the dinosaurs. It was happening now, and humans were causing it. I was horrified and immediately went to work doing whatever I could to help. Being only six, I couldn't run off and join a Greenpeace anti-whaling ship, so I did odd jobs and sold crafts and donated that money to wildlife non-profits. I mucked out cages at the local wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center. Then as I got older, I pursued my love of both wildlife and writing in undergrad and grad school.

I want to bring every tool I have to this endeavor to help wildlife — working in the field doing species-presence surveys, using GIS to map wildlife corridors, and writing these thrillers that shed light on the plight of our imperiled species, and hopefully tell a gripping tale while doing so!