When he was 19, Russell Heath hitchhiked his way out of a typical American suburb and up to the banks of the Tanana River in Alaska. Alaska would be his home base for several decades, even as he made other big, adventurous travels. He lived in Europe, sailed around the world in a 25-foot boat, traversed the jungles of Southeast Asia, crossed the Sahara, and eventually relocated to New York City in 2010, attracted by its frenetic pace. Heath now lives in Maine to be close with family and work as a coach to business and nonprofit leaders, but it’s clear what has had the biggest impact on him. “I still see myself as Alaskan. I’m just displaced right now,” he says. “I didn’t have a choice, really. I just had to go there. I was being driven.” 

Heath’s most recent novel, the eco-thriller Rinn’s Crossing, is set in the 49th state, as was his first novel, Broken Angels. But in both books, Alaska is much more than a setting. It becomes not only a complex character, but also a force that drives the motives of the novel’s other main figures. “Alaska is just extraordinary,” Heath says. “I mean, it’s beautiful beyond compare, and that beauty opens us up. It’s an adventure.” In Rinn’s Crossing, three characters try, in their own ways, to preserve that natural beauty: Rinn Vaness, a true mountain man living in the wilderness; Dan Wakefield, an Alaskan native and CEO of the Tlickquan Corporation; and Kit Olinsky, a single mother who has Heath’s old job as an environmental lobbyist to the Alaskan state legislature.

“If there’s one thing I do really well,” Heath explains, “it’s that I listen.” After years of hanging around in legislators’ offices, Heath’s memory is filled with the kind of political intrigue stories that never make it into the papers. (Although many had their own Alaskan twist, such as Heath’s delaying a hearing by threatening to dump a bucket of dead fish on the committee room table.) In thinking about his second novel, Heath knew that he wanted to write something that could tap into this knowledge and these great stories. “The question,” Heath says, “was how to mold them all together.” 

Heath realized that there weren’t a lot of legislative thrillers out there. “The difficulty is making the stakes high.” says Heath. “You just have this bloody bill….So my task was to create stakes high enough to keep people reading.” While toying with the idea of how to make backroom deals and political maneuvers more exciting, Heath found himself thinking about the extreme measures he sometimes fantasized about when frustrated with the system—namely, sabotaging a logging operation. “I would never do it. But I started thinking, well, if I could do it, what happens if somebody else got accused of that crime? What would I do? How would I respond?”

The novel, which Kirkus Reviews calls a “thrilling, engrossing work of serpentine intrigue,” starts from this idea and runs with it. Rinn Vaness commits an act of eco-terrorism, and Kit Olinsky ends up being blamed for it as well as for murder. At the same time, a powerful and ambitious senator leverages the trumped-up charges to push through a bill on Native land rights, so-called “subsistence,” which further complicates Dan Wakefield’s precarious position as a Native forced to oversee the clear-cutting of the forest in order to keep a claim on his ancestral home. To top it all off, Rinn is Kit’s former lover, and Dan is the man she now feels drawn to.

Heath excels at keeping the various interlocking storylines spinning forward with precision and clarity, but he also takes the time to let his characters reflect deeply on the volatile, complex politics at play and their implications. At one point, Kit wonders about her young son, Elias, and what side he would take: 

The sun had swung across the sky, and a slice of light lit up a framed photo of Elias running across the sand at Douglas beach. He was in diapers and nothing else, his hair long and wild and his face set in single-minded determination. White, male, privileged. Unless he had Native friends, subsistence would mean nothing to him, but already he loved the birds and wildlife of Alaska. Whose side do you take? Native mothers and their children—or forests filled with birds, bear, and wolf?

Heath explains that this is a peculiarity of Alaska; it’s perhaps the only place in the country where environmentalists and Native populations are not on the same page due to the unique ways that Alaska’s Natives have been exploited. For him, this was fertile ground for a story that would not only be thrilling, but also show readers how the different sides of a political battle are never ideological angels. “The worst kinds of battles are the battles where both sides are right,” Heath says. “Frankly, novels are boring if they’re just ideological rants. I didn’t want this to be a rant.” 

To that end, even the seemingly irredeemable, back-stabbing senators get to have their say. “The people on the other side are not evil,” Heath says. “They just see the world differently.” Throughout the novel, the pro-logging forces pulling the strings behind the scenes reveal their own relatable motivations, forcing Kit to think about the dirty tactics she herself has used in the past to kill bills and the negative consequences to democracy. “So here’s the kicker, the dirty tricks she plays….I did all that!” Heath says. “I was so proud of myself, but then I was writing the book and thought, ‘Oh….I subverted the public will.’ ” 

However different their motivations and tactics might be, all the characters are essentially acting out of their special bond with Alaska. For Heath, the state’s unique hold on people, including himself, is brought on by the physical and emotional challenges of engaging with its vast, untamed wilderness. Whether climbing trail-less mountains, living in a wood-heated cabin, or fighting for the conservation of its forests, Heath found that Alaska has stakes the rest of the country simply does not understand. 

“Most of us don’t have challenges that really tap us emotionally, physically, spiritually, in the same kind of way….Our lives are so convenient and so safe. It’s…when you’re out on the skinny branches and really risking something that life gets thrilling….In the case of Alaska, that’s there.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.