Breaking Wild (Diane Les Becquets)

Breaking Wild
Diane Les Becquets
Berkely
Fiction, Adventure/Thriller
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The Colorado wilderness offers all manner of adventures for any outdoor enthusiast, from day hikers and photographers to archaeologists and hunters. Amy Raye Latour, a bow hunter after elk, was determined to bag a kill away from her rifle-hunting companions, so she decided to strike out solo on the last day of their trip... and never returned, leaving behind a husband, a family, and a host of dark secrets about to come to light.
Ranger Pru Hathaway is no stranger to the local wilderness or to search operations; her dog is one of the few certified search animals in the area, and between them they've put in more than their share of hours scouring the woods and canyons for disoriented or injured visitors. But usually the missing are found fairly quickly, whether dead or alive. Amy Raye seems to have vanished off the face of the earth... but, while everyone else is convinced she fell victim to the foul weather or a cougar or perhaps even took her own life, Pru isn't so ready to give up.

REVIEW: The blurb made this sound like a taut story of survival, tracking both Pru's increasingly desperate searches for the truth and Amy Raye's increasingly hopeless situation. Unfortunately, it was also stuffed with far too much padding and backstory and an ending that draws itself out too long to maintain anything like solid tension.
Amy Raye got dealt a bad hand, victim of childhood sexual abuse that manifests in unhealthy coping behaviors that threaten her marriage and future, which doesn't quite excuse some of her outright selfish and stupid decisions during the course of her ordeal. Pru also had a trauma in her youth of a different nature, but turned her life around. Both find healing in the Colorado wilderness (albeit under different circumstances) - and in the fact that they have children and dogs, because apparently no woman's life is truly whole or healthy until she has reproduced and no other pet exists in the world they inhabit except dogs. (Seriously, the dog thing started getting out of hand, without adding much to the story.) Pru spends some time out in the woods on often-fruitless attempts to track the whereabouts of Amy Raye (or at least find her presumed body), but spends at least as much time, if not more, sitting around talking or observing how wonderful her teenage son is and how happy her Colorado life is and being totally oblivious to the romantic tension with the local sheriff, with numerous circular sidetracks into her history that ultimately add little to the story except page count. Amy Raye's side of the tale feels somewhat shorted; it, too, is devoured largely by repetitive glimpses of her sad youth and the bad choices that led her to her current low spot in life, then also wallows in the near-religious redemptive experience of being lost beyond all reasonable hope of rescue in the middle of nowhere. Many details of hunting and the Colorado wilderness are recreated in beautiful, sometimes stark detail: this is a place of marvelous natural wonders, but also a place where humans venture at their own risk, a place where there are all too often no second chances, and even those with experience can find events snowballing beyond their control in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, with all the backstory and the somewhat repetitive searches, it all ends up feeling less tense and more tedious long before it finally drags itself over the finish line for the ending.
While Breaking Wild has some decent descriptions and situations, ultimately I was uninterested in the meandering plot. (And, really, would it have killed someone in the cast - anyone - to have a pet cat? Hamster? Gecko? Anything but yet another dog?)

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