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The fictional killer, an itinerant taxi driver named Paul Biga, is arrested and convicted of committing 12 murders in and around the Barrow State Forest region between 1990 and 1997. The stories in Highway Thirteen flit in and out of that timeframe.
The action in the book starts innocuously enough with a group of six people taken into the woods by a small tour company, Mystic Tours, for a sort of Native American sweat-lodge-inspired purification ceremony. After the group is abandoned by their putative guide, John Lightfoot, they're left to their own devices in the face of limited food, struggles over what exactly to do, and the lurking perils of both the forest and the human mind.
Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of mystery novels published by Titan Books, spent almost nine years tracking down The Cocktail Waitress, the last novel of his favorite crime writer, and he’s passionate about it: “For fans of the genre, The Cocktail Waitress is the Holy Grail. It’s like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin—that’s how big a deal this is,” he said in an interview with Highbrow Magazine. Still, there were reservations.