The Price of Mercy

Dr. Tabitha Reynolds has spent her career pulling other people back from the edge—in emergency rooms, in bush clinics, in places where the medicine ran out before the need did. Surviving has never been her problem. Wanting to is another matter.

When her Cessna goes down in the Alaskan interior, no one knows where she is. She made sure of that. Then word reaches her from the life she left behind: the one door she believed closed forever has opened—and it won’t stay open long.

Now she must cross a hundred miles of frozen plains and dense forests with winter closing in, and face everything she fled: a marriage broken by her secrets, a grief too heavy to speak aloud, and memories that surface when there’s nowhere left to hide.

The Price of Mercy is a harrowing novel of survival without comfort, memory without mercy, and the quiet damage we carry long after the world stops watching.

Tristen Hannah was born in California and raised across Oregon and Washington. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and served six years as a submarine officer; since leaving the Navy he has spent a dozen years in data analysis and forecasting—the business of measuring risk and planning against what can go wrong. He lives in Indiana with his son, his daughter, and two dogs. The Price of Mercy is his first novel.