Telluride sits at the dead end of a box canyon, nine thousand feet up, with one road in and a mountain on three sides. Every morning before the lifts turn, Sloane Kessler decides whether that mountain is safe enough to open. When she's wrong, people die. When she's right, nobody thanks her.
Three years ago the snow took the man who taught her half of what she knows. Since then she has worn his brass compass on a chain under her shirt and let the job fill everything else. The highs went out with the lows. She made that trade on purpose. In a town of two thousand people, everyone knows what she lost, and they have stopped waiting for the old Sloane to come back.
Then a film crew arrives for the season. Cam Reeves wants to point a camera at the one person in town who can't afford to be wrong. He talks too much and notices more than he lets on. Sloane has a rule for men like him. She has a rule for everything.
A snowpack carries every storm of the winter in its layers. Sloane knows exactly where her weak one is. The question is what she does when something finally lands on it.
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Bex Smallwood is a recluse by temperament and a storyteller by compulsion.
When the calendar allows it, Bex is outside, pointed at the mountains. DANGER ROSE took years to write, and the people who asked about it often enough are the reason it's finished. It is a first novel.
Readers, booksellers and book clubs can write to bex@bexsmallwood.com.