Will Buchanan is a guy just like you and me. He lives up in the North Country, where he teaches and, in his off hours, volunteers for search and rescue on Mount Washington. In middle age, he's got few regrets. At the moment, most of them relate to his on-again, off-again relationship with Laurie, a gal just like you and me, except she happens to be the chief of police in the small town where she and Will live (once together, now separately).

The point is, it's an ordinary life, filled with ordinary habits. He drinks beer at the Brew and Burger bar with guys he's known for years, she picks up her newspaper at the mini-mart on the way home from work. Their story is so ordinary that the premise of Tom Eslick's mystery "Mountain Peril" (Viking) seems as much "what would you do?" as "whodunnit?," starting with the real-world setting he drops us into on the first page:

It was a little after three o'clock on a hot August afternoon when the woman descended from Slide Peak and took the Glen Boulder Trail back to Pinkham Notch. There hadn't been much of a view off Boot Spur because of a gauzy haze caused by high humidity.

Heading down the Glen Boulder Trail was relatively easy, and she made good time catching up to the Direttiss-ima Trail, which runs parallel to the highway and directly to Pinkham. She kicked it into high gear over the rolling terrain when her attention was drawn to rustling at the side of the trail.

She heard a muffled scream. Then she saw him. He stepped out onto the trail holding a long knife, his shirt covered with blood. She gasped. His head snapped up.

They both looked at each other. Then he shot a glance back up trail. She knew what he was doing. He was checking to see if anyone was coming.

She bolted away and sprinted up a small rise, tripped on a root, and fell. She picked herself up and stumbled as she tried to get her legs moving. He was coming fast. She screamed. Surely someone would hear her.

The author has laid his imagination across a familiar New Hampshire landscape and come up with some gruesome discoveries.

"I can't get anybody to go in the woods with me anymore," Eslick says with a laugh in a recent phone interview from his home in Andover, where he teaches English at Proctor Academy.

This book, the third mystery in his Will Buchanan series and his fourth set in the White Mountains, started, like all his books, with the seed of an idea planted in real life.

"Part of my job at school is to lead groups into the woods. (My) first novel was inspired by a student hiker who asked, what would happen if one of us disappeared out here? I said we'd do our best to find you. But the premise stuck with me. That's why I wrote "Tracked in the Whites." I had to find out who that student was and why they disappeared."

With "Mountain Peril," the "what if" is the real-life unsolved stabbing of Quebecois hiker Louise Chaput in November 2001.

To Eslick the book is not about Chaput as much as it's about the human condition. He draws a comparison to his songwriting. "If I picked up a line somebody says, it doesn't mean I wrote a song about that person. It's the bits and pieces of life as I see it."

What followed came out of his own experience and the research he'd done on Mount Washington. In fact, the only thing he knew about "Mountain Peril" when he started it was that he wanted to set a novel on Mount Washington.

"I think it's inherently dramatic. It's got the worst weather in the northern United States. It's sinister. It's a mountain that kills indiscriminately when people become lax," Eslick says. "I've been up there when it was really dangerous, not only cold but windy. You can go from T-shirts and shorts, then you get above timberline, into the alpine garden, something moves in, an occluded front, then boom, you're in trouble."

The murder in the novel turns out to be two murders, followed by close encounters with shady, obscurely motivated characters. And this is where Will is not like you and me. An ordinary person would stick to teaching, advising troubled students, drinking beer with his buddies, and practicing his rock climbing techniques (as Will initially tries to do). But then Laurie invites him to travel with her to Connecticut to check out a missing persons report that could be connected to the murder and, when Laurie gets shot, Will heads out on the trail of the murderer against all good judgment. For the book to work, you have to buy that they're also extraordinarily strong, clever and tenacious people. It's hard to hold both ideas in your head at the same time; still, you can't help but turn the pages to follow them wherever they're going next.