The Last Descent from Blackhorn Peak
A Mountain Rescue Chronicle Told Backward

About this book:

They began with nine men on the feast of Saint Agnes. Four return dragging a sledge across the frozen tongue of Blackhorn Peak, hauling something wrapped in oiled hemp and pinned with rowan staves—something that does not freeze, does not rot, and leaks warm drops onto ash runners in sub-zero air. The valley below is silent: chimneys cold, sheep standing dead in their stalls, a village vanished without tracks. And above them on the ridge, the dead are walking down.

Told in reverse, *The Last Descent from Blackhorn Peak* unwinds the rope from its bitter end. Each chapter steps further back up the mountain—through the screaming wind, the false summit, the ice cave where something watches, the night the avalanche fell—toward the first distress bell and the fateful decision to ascend. Brother Thomas, Father Christian, the crippled Mathias, and the boy Luc are not merely rescuers; they are witnesses to a compact broken, a thing that should have stayed beneath the Third Tier, and a climb that was never a rescue at all.

Visceral, claustrophobic, and steeped in the lore of the high Grisons, this is mountain literature turned inside out: a chronicle where the cold thinks, the ice remembers, and the weight on the sledge grows heavier with every mile downward. For readers of *The Terror*, *The Troop*, and *Thin Air*—a descent you won't survive unmarked.