Stephanie ColbertThriller Author stephaniecolbert.com
A solitary log cabin with a warm window glowing in a misty Colorado spruce forest beneath storm clouds
The new series • Steele Resolve

Scream in the Wilderness

Boot Hill, Colorado. 2016. Amanda Steele came to the mountains to be left alone. Then the killers came to her woods — and made it personal.

Book OneColorado RockiesAmanda Steele & Rocky
Meet the series ↓ Read the premise
Steele Resolve

One woman. One dog.
No one else coming.

A thriller series set in a town too small to hide in — and a wilderness too vast to search.

Amanda Steele is a widow, a novelist, and a markswoman who lives alone in a log cabin outside Boot Hill with her German shepherd, Rocky. She didn't go looking for trouble. Trouble was hung in her trees.

When nineteen-year-old Vicky Carlton is found murdered near Amanda's land, the local sheriff is out of his depth, the press is circling, and the only detective who takes Amanda seriously — Gabe Bradford — can't decide if she's his best witness or part of the pattern. Because there is a pattern. Organized. Patient. And still hunting.

Set in 2016 — before wolves returned to Colorado, when a single black wolf in the trees was an omen nobody could explain — Steele Resolve is about grief, fury, and a woman who refuses to be protected out of her own story.

Setting
Book One: Boot Hill, Colorado — a small mountain town in the Rockies, and the spruce forest around Amanda's cabin. Book Two moves to Denver, where Amanda goes to live with Gabe
Period
2016
Heroine
Amanda Steele — author, widow of Logan Steele, expert shot
Companion
Rocky, her German shepherd
Tone
Rural thriller — procedural bones, a slow-burn spark, and a heroine with a shotgun and a temper
The Books

Only the new series.
Nothing else.

Illustration of Amanda Steele holding a shotgun beside her German shepherd Rocky on a snowy trail through tall spruce trees
Book One • Steele Resolve

Scream in the Wilderness

Amanda Steele wanted quiet. She got a crime scene.

A young woman is dead in the wilderness Amanda calls home — killed with a hunter's knowledge and left where Amanda would find her. As more is taken and more is left behind as a message, Amanda is pulled into an investigation the town would rather whisper about: boot prints behind her cabin, a leaked headline screaming serial killer, a wolf that shouldn't exist, and killers who know exactly where she lives.

Detective Gabe Bradford wants her safe and out of the way. Amanda has never been either. “I'll get you, sons of bitches” isn't a threat in Boot Hill. It's a promise.

SeriesSteele Resolve #1 SettingBoot Hill, Colorado, 2016 FeaturingAmanda, Rocky & Gabe Bradford
Why Amanda fights →
Illustration of a snow-covered Denver street at night, lamplight glowing in storefronts beneath dark mountains
Book Two • Coming Next

Find My Sin, Save My Life

The second Steele Resolve novel is already plotted.

Amanda leaves Boot Hill behind and moves in with Gabe in Denver. But a new city doesn't mean a clean slate — what the killer left behind has followed her, and Denver's secrets have been waiting for her. In a place where nobody knows her name, the most dangerous thing isn't a stranger in the trees. It's a secret everybody agreed not to tell.

Amanda Steele returns — and this time, the deception starts much closer to home. Her new home.

StatusPlotted — next in series SeriesSteele Resolve #2 SettingDenver, Colorado
Dramatis Personae

The people of Boot Hill

The Heroine

Amanda Steele

Horror novelist with a cult following, widowed three years. Lives off the mountain in a cabin her husband's family gave her. Puts down injured animals herself, hates hunters who kill for sport, and does not miss.

The Loyal One

Rocky

Her German shepherd. Finder of tracks, finder of horrors, and the reason Amanda is still alive more than once. The best boy in Boot Hill — and he knows it.

The Detective

Gabe Bradford

Homicide detective who arrives expecting a witness and finds a complication: a woman who contaminated his crime scene by saving what she could — and who says thank you like a challenge.

The Deputy

Deputy Pete

Boot Hill's deputy. Feeds Rocky when Amanda can't get home, organizes twenty hunters to save a wolf with a tranquilizer gun, and cries where the Sheriff won't.

The Sheriff's Office

Mary & the Sheriff

Mary runs the office in everything but title. The Sheriff runs his mouth — to the Herald, mostly — and insists, against all evidence, that he had everything under control.

The Town

Boot Hill

Mrs. Lewis's lodging, Bob's Diner, Grapevine Grocery, Schumacher Quality Boots. A town that feeds you, houses you — and decides, all at once, whether it trusts you.

“Vicky. Her name is Vicky.”

— Amanda Steele, refusing to let a victim become a headline

Inside the Story

What the wilderness is hiding

An organized killer

The body was hung the way a hunter field-dresses game. That detail — precise, practiced, unhurried — is what turns a murder into a warning. The killers aren't hiding what they did. They're displaying it. And when pieces of the victims start appearing where Amanda will find them, the message gets personal: we know this land as well as you do.

About the Author

Stephanie Colbert

Stephanie Colbert writes thrillers the way she researches them — obsessively, and all the way down.

She grew up in Germany, the daughter of an Army officer and a mother from Rome — still her favorite city on earth. She now lives in south central Texas, where she grows flowers for a living, working the land by hand. She writes in the small hours, visualizes every scene before it reaches the page, and has been known to spend three hours verifying a single word in a dead language, because she would know if it were wrong.

A lifelong reader of fantasy who somehow writes horror and thrillers better than anything else, she is the author of six books and two novellas. Steele Resolve is her new series — and the only one on this site.

In Short
  • Writes: The Steele Resolve thriller series
  • Book One: Scream in the Wilderness
  • Book Two: Find My Sin, Save My Life — plotted & next
  • Home: South central Texas — flower farmer by day
  • Roots: Grew up in Germany; Rome in her blood
  • Method: Research first. Every tree, every wound, every boot print — checked.
A note on this site

stephaniecolbert.com is the home of Steele Resolve only. Publication news for Scream in the Wilderness and Find My Sin, Save My Life will be posted here as the books move toward release.