One Mile Under

One Mile Under is the third Ty Hauck novel from Andrew Gross, his 2015 thriller in which the ex-Greenwich detective is pulled into a Colorado mountain-town investigation by his niece, a river guide, after the suspicious drowning of a young rafter. The trail leads to fracking-water disputes, paper-thin local cover-ups, and a corporate antagonist whose interests have nothing to do with what the local sheriff wants to put in a case file.

Gross is on solid ground when Hauck operates as a small-team outsider (Switzerland, Greenwich, here Colorado), and the front half of One Mile Under is his best straight procedural work in the series: the kayak-fatality scene, the riverbed-chemistry forensics, the way Hauck slowly walks the angle from drowning to engineered drowning. The back half leans on a recurring genre crutch (multinational-corporate villains with paramilitary contractors), which dampens the tension a bit. The Colorado setting (Aspen, Carbondale, the Crystal River) is rendered with real care.

Recommended for Hauck-series completists and for readers looking for books like One Mile Under at the intersection of small-town procedural and resource-extraction thriller (C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels are the obvious comparison). Three stars, with a sharper first half than back half.