In a place so harsh that survivalis a struggle, one man has found the strength to kill ... Paul Wood is a modern vagabond, a man who chooses to leave the comforts of San Francisco to spend months backpacking through some of the world's most challenging terrain: Cameroon, Indonesia, Nepal. While hiking in the Himalayas, Paul gets more of a rush than he bargained for when he finds the body of a murdered hiker, the victim mutilated in a way that Paul has witnessed once before, years ago and thousands of miles away. To quell a scandal, the police rule the death a suicide and close the case. But Paul can't let it go. A man who has traveled through the thin air at the top of the world and across land mines in war zones, he is not easily discouraged. But his newest expedition will show him some of the darkest places imaginable, in both the terrain he navigates and the men he encounters. Finding the killer becomes Paul's new obsession—a journey that leads him dangerously close to the edge ... and maybe over it.

The Barnes & Noble Review In The Blood Price, a sequel of sorts to Jon Evans' award-winning debut novel, Dark Places, continent-hopping backpacker and wanderlust-afflicted computer programmer Balthazar "Paul" Wood breaks the Prime Directive of trekking: Don't get involved. The action begins in Sarajevo (still devastated by the effects of the civil war eight years earlier), where Paul and his Croatian-born girlfriend are visiting her sister. Paul soon gets involved in an illegal and perilous plot to get the sister out of the country and away from her psychotic gangster boyfriend, who happens to be the leader of a vicious local paramilitary group. In his desperate rush to elude this sadistic pack of wolves, Paul takes refuge in a dragon's cave by making a deal with a criminal overlord and "self-deluded dot-com CEO" who specializes in refugee smuggling. The agreement is simple: For safe passage to America, Paul must help design a secure web site that will exponentially expand the smuggler's many burgeoning criminal interests. But when Paul realizes just how unconscionably evil his temporary employer is, he decides to take matters into his own hands. From war-torn Bosnia to the tropic paradise of Belize to the Nevada desert during the Burning Man festivities, Evans moves this action-packed thriller along at breakneck pace until its highly explosive conclusion. Fans of recent down-and-dirty thrillers like Charlie Huston's Henry "Hank" Thompson novels (Caught Stealing and Six Bad Things) and Will Staeger's Painkiller will thoroughly enjoy this comparable rip-roaring adventure. Paul Goat Allen