She ticked off each item on her fingers. “You climbed a three-hundred-foot redwood. Got shot at, twice. Totaled my car. Saved my life, at least twice. Fractured your leg, cracked some ribs.” She paused for a moment, and Peter wondered how far she’d get into this. She took a breath. “You also killed at least one man, maybe more, depending on how you see things. You got stuck in the hospital, which made your post-traumatic stress flare up. And now we’re on the run in the middle of the night from whoever is hunting me.”

This one was really good.

Burning Bright, by Nick Petrie, is the second in a series about Peter Ash, a Marine war veteran who came home with PTSD that manifests itself as claustrophobia. He’s basically unable to spend any time indoors, so he’s been living under the sky for months, hiking and camping. In the redwoods of northern California he gets chased up a tree by a grizzly bear. There he unexpectedly encounters a climbing rope, which he follows up into a majestic, old-growth tree. Eventually he finds a platform in the upper branches, where he meets a beautiful young woman, pointing a bow and arrow at him.

Her name is June Cassidy. She’s a journalist, and her scientist mother died recently. Not long after, some men kidnapped her, but she managed to escape them, and now she’s here in a research post a friend built, hiding from the kidnappers, who’ve been trailing her. They are in fact at the bottom of the tree now, setting up a trap for her. Peter offers his considerable skills as a protector, and together they make their way to June’s car, in which they begin a breathless chase headed toward Seattle, and eventually into a confrontation with June’s eccentric father, a kind of a cross between Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs.

The writing in Burning Bright was extremely good. The plotting and the action never let up. What made it even better was that the characters were well-realized, and Peter’s and June’s developing relationship was a lot of fun.

Cautions for language and violence. Possible, hinted leftist opinions may become more apparent in later books (or not). But I highly recommend Burning Bright to anyone who enjoys a good thriller in the Jack Reacher vein.