Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Montana novelist Colleen O’Brien on Friday, June 27 at 6:00 pm. O’Brien will read from her debut novel Baited (Unbridled Books, June 2025). This event is free and open to the public.
About Baited:
It’s 2004, the summer of Glacier Park’s grizzly bear DNA study. In the Cut Bank Valley, Clancy Dyer dashes through the aspen to roust her coworker Ezra. She finds his shredded tent and a horrible smell. Ezra has disappeared. Meanwhile, District Ranger Mack Savage speeds toward the valley’s car campground in response to his rookie ranger’s report of unusual grizzly bear behavior.
Mack has been dating Liz Ralston, the biologist conducting a groundbreaking DNA study. Saboteurs have wrenched her materials and she suspects both park personnel and a local climber. Frustrated with Mack’s inability to protect her study, Liz is hell bent on making the sabotage stop. As they work to find Ezra, Clancy and Mack untangle a knot of misdeeds and discover the cruelty of people desperate for recognition, revenge and belonging. Told from multiple voices representing Glacier’s eclectic east side community, Baited grapples with the clash of emotions surrounding grizzly bears, relationships across social and cultural boundaries, and what it means to behave honorably in an unjust world.
Author Biography:
Colleen O’Brien’s writing was included in the anthologies A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, and A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories. Her short stories and essays have been published in Montana Quarterly, Flathead Living, The Missoulian, Whitefish Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Weddings, Montana Outdoors, Go
Local Flathead Valley, and on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is co-owner of several East Glacier, Montana businesses. She lives with her family near Glacier Park. Baited is her first novel. The manuscript was awarded the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship at Porches Writing Retreat in Virginia.
