An Alpine Mystery: Review of We Bring You an Hour of Darkness by Micheal Bourne
by Michael Bourne
Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2025
I love a great thriller, and this one was suitably fun and engaging, along with teaching me a bit about the way a local newspaper works. The author, Michael Bourne, lives in Vancouver and teaches writing at BCIT and it's always great to see local writers publishing their work. I reviewed this book for The British Columbia Review. This article was originally published on November 14, 2025.
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When an ecological collective in the picturesque mountain valley of Elkhorn Canyon begins to use violent methods to stop the impending expansion of a ski resort, the peace in small-town Franklin, Colorado is shattered, and loyalties will be tested. In the centre of this political storm, the owner of a local newspaper and her journalist crew follow leads and uncover intrigue that will shake the town. From the opening pages, Vancouver-based author (and former Aspen Daily News reporter) Michael Bourne’s latest novel We Bring You an Hour of Darkness had me hooked.
Patricia “Tish” Threadgill is the owner and publisher of one of the town’s two local newspapers, the Daily Flyer. She’s up against the Daily Bulletin, and the ongoing war between the two is coming to a head. Tish’s paper, in debt and holding on by a thread, is not the likely winner. The attack on the ski hill staves off the paper’s demise temporarily as she sends out her reporters to cover the story, but every day is a battle to keep the paper afloat.
The setting is small-town America in the early 1990s, a time before cell phones (one character muses: “What the world needs, she thinks, is a little phone you can pull out of your pocket and call anyone whenever you feel like it.”). Franklin is a charming town but ruled by an old boy’s club of sorts, with big money backing the ski hill proposal. Tish is a strong character from the outset, flying under the radar as she publishes the news: “… invisibility is her secret weapon…. Men still make most of the decisions, even here in tree-hugging, Anita Hill-believing Franklin, Colorado, and a woman that men don’t see coming is a woman they underestimate every time.”
The issues raised in Bourne’s story are nonetheless modern ones as well. In the novel, an environmental group called The Jack Frost Collective opposes the powerful Dunrow family’s big money plan to develop a pristine portion of the canyon, a disruption that has the potential to displace the threatened Canadian lynx. The book begins with an act of sabotage by one member of the environmental collective who leaves a provocative note: “On behalf of the lynx, we bring you an hour of darkness.”
The words are important, because Franklin is also home to famous (fictional, to be sure) American writer Bill Blanning, who penned a 1971 book called A Screwdriver in the Gears. It seems that the Jack Frost Collective is taking lessons from Blanning’s book: the main character was Jack Frost, and he was a master at sabotage in the name of fighting environmental harms. From the fictional book within this book, Jack is discussing his strategy with a friend:
“You were raised up in this valley just like me,” said the old miner. “You know people here, they don’t see things the way you do. Even if you’re right.”
“Don’t you get it, Erskine?” Jack said. “That’s the whole reason I’m doing this. I turned off their goddamn lights so they could see.”
Bourne’s mystery-thriller raises several ethical dilemmas, and many of them are front and centre. He focuses on each character’s internal ethical challenges and decisions rather than spending too much time analyzing the pros and cons of eco-terrorism, but I was engaged by the ideas he wove through the story about corruption and suppression of scientific data. What’s “right” in the overall ethical sense is usually obvious, but when each character has to wrestle with their life circumstances and financial wellbeing, things get muddied indeed.
To this end the multiple point of view narrative was a good choice, with each character bringing a different sensibility to the page. Given the varied allegiances and interpersonal conflicts that a small-town setting can bring, it felt necessary in order to flesh out the emotional touchpoints of the newspaper battle and the sometimes underhanded politics at play. Tish is the heart and soul of the Daily Flyer, in part because she’s still highly affected by her brother’s suicide five years ago. She had to take over the paper from him, and so her emotional ties are enormous. This also makes her practical. Seeing her pulled between wanting to keep the paper alive through advertising revenue from the ski hill backers in town while itching to break damning stories against them was somewhat painful.
If Tish shows us ethics with a dose of practicality, then her young, law school dropout reporter Chuck is delightfully innocent, the pure heart of the story. Seasoned reporter Moira provides grit and groundedness. Along with other significant characters, Bourne (Blithedale Canyon) has created a satisfying team of underdog reporters who have lots to lose if they don’t break the next big story in the Franklin ski hill drama, and I always love a good David and Goliath tale.
There are plenty of plot twists—none of which I guessed specifically, though I had my suspicions about some characters—and as the action came to its apex, I found the mystery satisfying and the ending suitably cathartic. But I was left with a slightly pessimistic view of the future for the lynx of Elkhorn Canyon. You can win a battle but the war’s outcome is dubious. Bill Blanning, the novelist character whose book the Jack Frost Collective used as a blueprint, is chatting to another character late in the book:
“There was this moment,” he says, “this one, brief moment, before Watergate, before the oil embargo, when it felt like we were winning. We got the EPA. We got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. They were opening up wilderness areas right and left. There was just this momentum, and it felt like maybe America was finally coming to its senses…But I was wrong. Boss Burroughs [a big money character in Blanning’s book] isn’t the problem. The problem’s everybody else. The problem is us.”
Bourne’s novel is a mystery wrapped in layers of small-town politics and interpersonal grudges that compelled me to keep reading. His writing is seamless, and he’s got the knack of just enough plot hooks, with exactly the right amount of peril for his characters, strung out perfectly to keep the reader wanting more. I had a great time trying to guess where the action on the page would take me. We Bring You an Hour of Darkness, with its environmental wake-up call and ethical dilemmas, is a mystery novel that entertains while providing ample room for contemplation.
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