The Dark Place, by Aaron Elkins

The Dark Place, by Aaron Elkins, is the second in the Gideon Oliver series. In Fellowship of Fear, the widowed Oliver meets a woman, however he is alone at the beginning of The Dark Place. However, we are reintroduced to FBI agent John Lau. Mysterious happenings occur in the Olympic National Park, in Olympia, Washington State. Six years ago, two hikers disappeared. A few days ago, a woman has disappeared. When some bones are found, John Lau asks Gideon Oliver, who is working at a dig at Dungeness, to come look at them.

Once at the park, Gideon meets park ranger Julie Tendler, and works with John Lau to solve the mystery of the disappearing hikers.

Sample paragraphs

John held open the door, and Gideon awkwardly bowed Julie through, not at all sure if she would like the gesture. She went through with a pleasant smile, and they stepped out into the town of Quinault. It was a shock. They had entered the hotel building from a spacious, sunny lawn peopled with sunbathers and laughing volleyball players, and with ten square miles of open lake at their backs. When they walked out through the rear entrance, no more than forty feet away, they stepped into a sunless shadowy world of almost solid green, hushed and perceptibly cooler and more moist than the lawn.

The "town," invisible from the air, consisted of several buildings out of the nineteenth century along either side of a narrow road. On the right was an old post office and a weathered, rustic general store - Lake Quinault Merc, the sign said - with a wooden porch complete with an old dog sprawled lazily on it. On the left was the Quinault Ranger Station, a group of small frame houses. Everything was dwarfed and hemmed in by towering walls of cedar and spruce, so tall and close together that the sky was only visible as a narrow slit high above the road. The road itself gave the illusion of being cut off at either end by more tree walls, and the overall effect was like being at the bottom of a sunken corridor, a narrow, gravelike canyon cut deep in the living mass of trees.

Elkins gives the story an excellent sense of place. Makes you long to visit there... see if it still exists as he described. (Aarons and his wife still live in Olympia, Washington.)

The only flaw in the book is that Gideon manages to learn a foreign language in 24 hours...I don't really think that's possible. But if you suspend your disbelief, it's an enjoyable book.

The Gideon Oliver series
Fellowship of Fear (1982)
The Dark Place (1983)
Murder in the Queen's Armes (1985)
Old Bones (1987)
Curses! (1989)
Icy Clutches (1990)
Make No Bones (1991)
Dead Men's Hearts (1994)
Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
Skeleton Dance (2000)
Good Blood (2004)
Where There's a Will (2005)
Unnatural Selection (2006)
Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
Uneasy Relations (2008)
Skull Duggery (2009)