Those Who Wish Me Dead

Those Who Wish Me Dead is a novel by the American writer Michael Koryta, published in the United States by Little, Brown in June 2014. It mixes a manhunt with a wilderness survival story, and it was adapted into a film in 2021.

Jace Wilson is a teenager from Indiana who sees a murder committed. His parents cannot use the witness protection programme, because the killers have connections inside law enforcement, so they place him with Ethan and Allison Serbin, a couple who run a wilderness survival course for troubled young people in the mountains of Montana.

Jace spends the summer under the name Connor Reynolds. The murderers, Jack and Patrick Blackwell, work out where he has gone and follow him into the mountains, and when he realises they are closing in, he and Ethan head into the back country. A forest fire is burning and a severe electrical storm is coming, and the boy's other hope is Hannah Faber, a former smokejumper working alone in an isolated fire tower, who has already failed once to keep a child alive.