Observer

"Renata Scarborough would have said it didn't matter if her mother, Corinne, were alive or dead. She knew all she needed to: Corinne's work at McNairy Observatory had taken precedence over everything, motherhood and all. But when the full contents of Corinne's life, including the paranoid writings of an unknown early 20th-century surveyor, arrive on her doorstep, Renata is drawn to that far-flung outpost in the Nevada desert in search of answers. Who was her mother? What was she really researching? Why did she and her colleagues suddenly vanish? In McNairy, Renata finds herself caught within a mysterious, thorny decades-long drama between science and the desert unknown. The observatory was shuttered nearly thirty years ago, and the denizens of McNairy won't tell her why. Disconcerting entries from Corinne's journals bring more questions than answers. As Renata ascends the mountain, she begins to witness unnerving phenomena, scenes in the environment that she cannot explain, and a creeping intimation of her mother's lingering presence. Haunting, darkly comic, and coolly captivating, OBSERVER turns the desert and its mysteries into pure cosmic terror, a place of wonder and menace, asking what happens when we look out at nature and find something inhuman looking back"-- Provided by publisher.