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Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks

Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks

by Benjamin Hale

Harper ·2026 ·304 pages
New Release
Bottom of the Pile
Bottom of the Pile
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22/99
Maybe Someday

44/99

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1/99

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About This Book

With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty five years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them. This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale's cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state's history. Her disappearance—and a ghostly vision she reported once she was found—would eventually connect her disappearance to another almost forgotten story from twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of brainwashing and murder and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet. Enriched by Benjamin Hale's own family lore and connections to the culture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, police and corruption, and religion and skepticism. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both trapped in the verdant, suffocating grip of the Arkansas wilds.


Reviews

"Hale's subjects and his willingness both to look at and to look beyond their worst moments ..."

John G. Turner· The Wall Street Journal Near the Top

"These repetitions, as well as Hale's incorporation of so many threads that are irrelevant to the main one, start to feel like the author's attempts to mask the fact that the cult crime story didn't quite provide him enough material for a full book."

Jonathan Russell Clark· The New York Times Read review ↗ Bottom of the Pile

"An intimate, deeply original, true crime narrative ..."

Alice Cary· BookPage Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"A story of true crime that evokes the idea of good and evil both seen and believed."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"A hair-raising story about a killing ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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