🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.6/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Book 2 in the Frankie Elkin Series
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read One Step Too Far yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Frankie Elkin is back. And this time she has traded city streets for the Wyoming wilderness, a missing groom, and a group of men with secrets they have been sitting on for five years.
If you read Book 1 and assumed you knew what a Frankie Elkin book looked like, this one is here to prove you wrong. One Step Too Far is faster, wilder, and genuinely uncomfortable in the best possible way — because Frankie isn’t just investigating a disappearance this time. She’s doing it while learning how to hike for the first time in her life, running out of food, and slowly realizing that someone out there in those trees wants her dead.
I liked this one more than Book 1. That’s not a small thing.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Setup
On a bachelor party camping trip five years ago, Tim O’Day walked into the Wyoming woods and never came back. His father Martin, unable to accept the not-knowing, has made every man who was on that trip return to search for Tim every year since. Or at least his remains. Martin just needs to know what happened to his son.
That is the kind of grief that doesn’t let people go. And Frankie Elkin, who has made a life out of finding the ones everyone else gave up on, shows up in Ramsey, Wyoming, and joins the search.
She has never hiked before. She hates it immediately.
The Team (And the Red Flags)
The group is already a mess before they hit the trail. Martin is the team leader — intense, grief-hollowed, doing whatever it takes. The bachelor party guys are there because they feel they have no choice: Scott, Neil, Miguel, Josh. Five guys went into the woods. One never came home. The other four have barely spoken since.
There’s also Bob, who says he’s with the Bigfoot Hunters Society and is along for the ride. And Luciana, the handler for Daisy — a search and rescue dog who will turn out to be the smartest member of this entire expedition.
One thing that surfaces almost immediately: Martin paid Bob five thousand dollars to make sure Martin gets out of these woods alive. Bob claims it was just a donation to the Bigfoot society. Frankie doesn’t buy it. And if someone hired muscle to protect Martin — it means someone else might be trying to make sure he doesn’t make it out.
Also worth noting: Tim’s fiancée Latisha ended up with Scott and they are currently expecting a baby. One of the men on the trip. Frankie clocks this and files it away.
Into the Woods
The hiking is brutal and Frankie makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. She is figuring out blisters and altitude and how to read a trail while also quietly reading every person around her. That dual track — physical survival and investigative instinct running at the same time — is what makes this book feel so different from the first one. You’re not just watching her solve something. You’re watching her survive while she solves it.
The sabotage starts almost immediately. They hear screaming in the night. It’s Scott, who sleepwalks and says he thought he saw Tim. But Scott insists it wasn’t him screaming. And when they get back to camp, half the food is gone. Someone destroyed it. They now have four days of provisions left.
Then Neil falls at the cliff base. He says he heard something behind him, something hit his head. He doesn’t think it was a rock. He also doesn’t think it was one of their group.
Someone is out there. And they are watching.
What Really Happened That Night
Five years of silence, and it starts to crack.
Frankie learns that Tim was a particular kind of person — charming, loved by everyone, with a habit of wanting whatever belonged to someone else. Scott had been in love with Latisha. Tim knew. Tim moved on her anyway. Neil had dated Latisha before that. Tim stole her from him too. Tim also stole a job interview from one of the guys. The pattern is clear.
But the thing nobody had said out loud — the thing that sent Tim walking alone into the dark — comes from Miguel. They were all completely drunk that night. Tim got emotional, started apologizing. He apologized to Scott about Latisha. He apologized about the job. And then he told Josh — the best man, his oldest friend — that he had slept with Josh’s younger sister Juliana. That he had gotten her pregnant. Juliana had dropped out of school sophomore year. She’d had an abortion. She’d never told anyone who the father was.
Josh went after Tim. Beat him. Told him they were done. Tim left camp alone, drunk, in the middle of the night.
And that was the last anyone saw of him.
Martin has been dragging these men back into the wilderness every year, not knowing that his son walked out of that camp voluntarily — and that every one of them has been carrying that guilt ever since.
Being Hunted
Frankie figures out that Martin hired Bob as a private investigator — not just a Bigfoot enthusiast along for the ride. In the weeks before the trip, Martin’s house had been broken into, his hiking gear stolen, threatening emails arrived telling him to stay away, and his car died. Someone has been trying to stop this search from happening. And what’s different about this year? Martin filed a permit to search Devil Canyon specifically. Someone knows what’s in there.
When Luciana and Daisy leave to get help, taking Nemmeth with them, the rescue the group is waiting for never arrives. Morning comes and the rest of the food is gone. Bear bait has been scattered around camp. Someone wants to draw bears in.
Then they find it.
A door in the rock that looks like stone but is Styrofoam. Frankie and Bob open it. Inside: eight bodies. Eight missing hikers. The burial cave they’ve been trying not to believe existed.
Martin hears about it and knows his son is in there. He won’t leave. He needs to see it.
A shot fires. Martin is hit. And then he runs — he deliberately leads the hunter away from Frankie and Bob. He is okay with dying. He is okay being where Tim is.
The Final Push
Bob gets shot. He can feel blood in his lungs. He tells Frankie to run and she tries desperately to save him. She can’t.
They are moving through the trees, nearly out of options, when Martin comes back out of nowhere — still alive, still standing — and attacks the hunter. The hunter stabs him in the chest, over and over, and somehow Martin is still on his feet. He charges. He takes them both over the edge.
Micky is shot. Frankie collapses. She wakes up to Daisy licking her face and a helicopter overhead.
The Hospital — And the Real Answer
Luciana was attacked on the trail and tied to a tree. Nemmeth went back for her and was found barely alive on the mountain. Micky made it through surgery. Scott survived. Neil just needs rest. Martin and the hunter’s bodies haven’t been found.
And then Frankie goes through the bags. She finds synthetic decomp in Nemmeth’s. That’s the moment. That’s how she knows.
She breaks into Marge’s cabin — Nemmeth’s girlfriend. Inside: trophies from every kill.
Here’s what Frankie pieces together: Marge’s sister was the very first hiker who went missing in those woods. Marge inherited a family cabin after her sister’s death, then called Nemmeth to help cover it up. And when Tim went missing and all those men from the bachelor party came stumbling into the diner that first morning — scared, confused, not knowing what had happened — they handed Marge her next targets. They had no idea they’d walked straight into a predator’s hunting ground.
Marge and Nemmeth had been running that burial cave for years.
When Frankie confronts them, Marge throws Nemmeth straight under the bus. Then Frankie pulls his IV out, and Marge watches him writhing in pain and breaks — she confesses to everything. Every single kill.
Nemmeth dies in the hospital. Luciana decides Frankie needs some time to decompress. They check into a nice hotel and stay a week.
That’s the ending. And it is so satisfying.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Marge. Marge and Nemmeth. You are watching Frankie navigate this group of guilty, grieving, complicated men the whole book, and the answer isn’t any of them. It’s the woman sitting in the diner, the one who got a cabin out of her own sister’s death, the one nobody looked at twice. I did not see it coming and I loved that I didn’t.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 / 5 — Zero steam. This is straight thriller, no romance. If you’re coming in for the love story, wrong series — but if you want to be genuinely unsettled and completely hooked, stay.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. The way Frankie gets the confession out of Marge by pulling that IV — that is such a Frankie move. No authority, no backup, just the specific kind of chaos she carries everywhere she goes.
Would I Reread It?
Yes. Knowing who Marge and Nemmeth are from the start would make a reread completely different — every interaction at that diner would hit differently.
Who Is This For
If you love a thriller that does something genuinely different — wilderness survival crossed with cold case investigation, a protagonist who doesn’t know what she’s doing physically but knows exactly what she’s doing in every other way — this series is for you. Read them in order. Book 1 sets up who Frankie is. Book 2 makes you love her.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA
🎁 New to Audible? Get 3 months free (US)
📚 More from the Frankie Elkin Series
- Book 1 — Before She Disappeared | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ /5 | Steam: 🔥
- Book 2 — One Step Too Far | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 4.6/5 | Steam: 🔥
- Book 3 — Still See You Everywhere — Coming Soon
- Book 4 — Kiss Her Goodbye — Coming Soon
- Full Series Review — Is the Frankie Elkin Series Worth Reading? — Coming Soon
Ready for more from LD? Find them here
Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Series: Frankie Elkin Book 2 | Genre: Thriller / Mystery | Steam: 🔥