When asked once by a reporter why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, legendary mountaineer George Mallory replied, “Because it’s there.”

A lure as old as time, of course, and one that oozes through Catherine McKenzie’s taut new psychological suspense thriller, Have You Seen Her. Set inside the world of rugged adventurers and carpe diem rock climbers — and anchored amid the peaks and valleys of California’s Yosemite National Park — it is literally a cliffhanger of a novel!

Have You Seen Her also adds another wrinkle to the ‘Because it’s there’ rationale; asking why in this modern era, people feel the need to document and broadcast every aspect of their lives to their swarms of ‘followers’. It is something that certainly swam to mind when I was reading this one. Cleverly, to this end, part of this novel unfolds via a narrative employed by one of its key players through her Instagram posts; in the process, begging the question: How much is real? How much is stage-crafting? How much is merely implied?

A burner phone. A start over. A search and rescue: as the lives of three women intersect (our protagonist Cassie, a just-out-of-college influencer, and Petal who lives in a trailer with her much older wife) it soon becomes apparent why the book has been called Sleeping with the Enemy meets Free Solo. It burns good and slow. 

“A beautiful place that is at the same time such a dangerous place,” McKenzie told me when I called her up recently to talk, giving me the spiel on what drew her to Yosemite. Initially, she was inspired by the stories of her own sister and brother-in-law — both of whom worked in outdoor search and rescue — but then “Gabby Petito happened,” which became a whole new impetus for her story. She is, of course, referring to the real-life media sensation that ensued when a young woman — part of a growing group of nomads taking extended road trips — went missing in 2021, and whose remains were later found in a remote part of the Wyoming desert. Although her boyfriend was later implicated in her murder, it brought scrutiny to the growing lifestyle that now has its own hashtag: #Vanlife.

McKenzie, who was a lawyer in a past life (she’s presented cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court) and the author of several other bestsellers, filled me in on what drives her writing and what draws her to the wilderness.

 

The Lay of The Land

Asked what sort of research she set out to do while writing Have You Seen Her, the author explained, “A lot of it was just super practical stuff. Like, what would you do if your radio broke? How do you run a rescue?” The basic lingo, even, “that hopefully gives the book verisimilitude” — like, for instance, the term “sympathetic vertigo” that comes up in dialogue at one point. Something that happens to people when they are watching others at high precipices. 

“I grew up hiking and being outdoors. My dad would take us out without a compass, which is really stupid, in retrospect. People don’t understand,  here is one statistic: Most people who die of exposure do that in the summer, not in the winter. People letting their guards down, or perhaps not comprehending that even in the Adirondacks, the highest peak is 5,000 feet above elevation and the weather can change in an instant. All the different variables, ones that you cannot control and others that are outside of your control.” 

“A lot of what my sister and brother-in-law did — their rescues — involved someone having heat stroke, or thinking they were having a heart attack, nothing too big in the scheme of things, or like hanging off a cliff. Just people who had gone a little too far into the woods.” 

 

A Mono-Culture

Given that the main character in the book, Cassie, is literally running away from something when she shows up in Yosemite, I was interested in knowing if McKenzie had observed any common characteristic about the people on the search-and-rescue front lines, as well as those attracted to life off the grid; did they want to drop out of life, so to speak? “There is an aspect of that, for sure,” she said, but there are also other considerations to take into account. 

“Your lodging is free and you are only paid when you go out to rescue. So, there is an altruistic aspect. But also to live in this community, you are narrowing down applicant pool in terms of age requirements (a younger demo, plus people who are single and/or have loose family relations). There is a certain amount of economic status, often. The thing that came up with the Gabby Petito case, the sort of privilege that you could take your summer off after college.” 

 

The Stories We Tell

Asked about the ways in which being a lawyer has infused her fiction, and the way she crafts her characters, McKenzie had this to say: “In this book, people are being intentionally misleading. What the law taught me is that many more things are grey than we think they are; that two people can have a conversation, they will both have memories of that conversation and they will remember different things, but it does not mean either of them are lying.” Certainly, anyone who has been in a courtroom knows how two different witnesses can have different takes on what happened! Even in families, this happens. “The transfusion of story,” she says.

“I am always fascinated to hear,” she went on, “when people get divorced that a sadness of the divorce is you are losing memories, in that we form units and we literally deposit memories into another person. So, that can be part of the loss. I have had to convince a couple of clients who say they have perfect recall — but they didn’t — through documents. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they have an infallible memory.”

Why do so many lawyers write books? Primarily, she said, because “we have access to people’s most stressful situations and traumas.” Not to mention, a maelstrom of emotions. Sounds like a transferable skill, indeed.