Recommendations for thriller/mystery for an outdoor/adventure lover?

My pastor's wife loves thrillers and mysteries that take place in rugged settings but, obviously, aren't too much in the violence and sex department!! LOL We're friends and she's pretty laid back so it doesn't have to be totally prim and proper and all that, just not over the top.

Any suggestions I can give to her?

I've always found Nevada Barr's Anna Pidgeon series quite good. Touchstones useless as usual, so you'll have to search for it. Anna is a national park ranger who can't stay put and is in a new park for every novel. From the Dry Tortugas to Nachez Trace to Rocky Mountain National Park, it runs the gamut. Lots of outdoorsy stuff, murder and shenanigans. Anna is a great character and has really evolved since the first one. I like her a lot.

If the "great outdoors" extends to the ocean, Sam Llewellyn has written a number of thrillers set in the world of deep-water yacht racing . . . highly recommended if that kind of thing appeals to you (as it does to me).

Aaron Elkins's The Dark Place takes places in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and many of his subsequent "Gideon Oliver" novels have some "outdoorsy" elements.

The landscape of the desert Southwest is very much present in the Navajo Tribal Police novels of Tony Hillerman, though not always explicitly worked into the plot.

A number of British thriller writers from the 1960s and 1970s wrote thrillers (muted violence, no sex, PG language) with the kind of settings you're looking for, but most are out of print and they take some looking-for. Especially good:

Jack Higgins, East of Desolation (Greenland) and The Last Place God Made (the Amazon)

Duncan Kyle, A Cage of Ice, Whiteout! (the Arctic), and Green River High (the jungles of SE Asia, I think)

Alistair MacLean, Bear Island, Night Without End (the Arctic), Breakheart Pass (the Sierra Nevada in the 1880s), and When Eight Bells Toll (the Hebrides)

also . . .

Hammond Innes made a specialty of adventure/thriller stories in exotic wilderness areas. Campbell's Kingdom, High Stand, The Golden Soak, The Blue Ice, and Atlantic Fury are just a few.

Geoffrey Jenkins wrote mostly about the wild fringes of the South Atlantic . . . try The Hollow Sea, Bridge of Magpies, or A Twist of Sand for starters

Desmond Bagley's The Vivero Letter takes place in the backwoods of South America, and a number of other works by him have some wildnerness to them.

Much of this older stuff is probably available used through Amazon for about the price (book plus shipping) of a new paperback.

Good luck!

ABVR has some great suggestions. Also look at Fell of Dark by Reginald Hill, a thriller that involves a cat and mouse in games in the British Peak District. Some of Dick Francis's horse racing mysteries like Banker and Slay Ride. Claire Francis's Wolf Winter. Other out of print Brits to look at might be Desmond Bagley, J.R.L. Anderson and some Andrew Garve books like The Far Sands and of course Erskine Calders classic Riddle of the Sands.

i highly recommend Ender's Game (first in a series) by Orson Scott Card. However, it is a rather depressing story until the end.
There is also accidental murder, but nothing sexually bad atall-its a sci-fi series.

Try out CJ BOX. His hero Joe Pickett is a game warden. Set in Wyoming.

Wow, thanks so much, everyone! I've got a great start and my friend will be so pleased with a nice selection of reads for the beach this summer. And I found some titles that I would enjoy as well. Much appreciated!

Death and the Good Life by Richard Hugo. Also there are some Alaska mysteries by an author named Staley, I believe. John Staley?

You might like Dana Stabenow's mysteries. They feature Kate Shugak, an Aleut woman who lives in a national park in Alaska. There is some sex and violence, but not what I would consider "over the top".

#8 - speaking of Alaska reminds me of the Sue Henry novels that take place there - I can't remember the characters' names, but the hero - who only appeared in the first 3 or 4 - was a state trooper, I think. The heroine - who took over as the "brains" after the first few books - raised sled dogs and raced in the Ididarod (sp?). I lost interest and stopped reading after about the 6th book - I liked the trooper better, I guess, but Henry is still writing these books, I think.

#10 sjmccreary... It's the Iditarod, and a book which I found really interesting was Race across Alaska: First woman to win the Iditarod tells her story by Libby Riddles and Tim Jones. Not fiction of course. Full of interesting details, down to earth and factual, and, for me at least, a real page turner.

edited to say: Sorry - I know this is a bit off-topic.

#10, 11 ~ thanks, both of these sound like good options!

Hammond Innes's books keep showing up in fairly large quantities in my local used bookstore. How and why is beyond me, and I already own about 20 of them, so my finding one new to me has so far been fruitless. They're very good stories, though. So are Desmond Bagley's books; similar in subject, too. They both wrote in the mid-20th century, and their (always male) protagonists were usually the strong silent type.

Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon is a wonderful character, and there's a new book coming this summer!