Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie EicharRead about the other books on the list.
This especially “cold” case will seem familiar to fans of True Detective and the 2000 pound “corpsicle” at the heart of season four’s crime story. Writer/director Issa López acknowledged being inspired by the strange case of nine elite Russian hikers who died in the Siberian wilderness in 1959. The real-life mystery of the Dyatlov Pass hikers isn’t so much about how they perished—hypothermia was ruled the cause of death in almost all cases (although blunt force trauma was a factor in three of the deaths). Rather, it’s why, because the peculiar details surrounding that night make this one an enduring mystery.
The bodies were found about a mile from their tent, which had been ripped open, and none of these expert hikers were wearing shoes in sub-zero temperatures. Not only that, but one body was wearing two watches while another was missing a tongue, and some of their clothes tested positive for radioactivity. In Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, author Donnie Eichar presents a well-constructed and scientifically plausible theory to explain this head-scratcher of a case which, over the years, has been chalked up to everything from the KGB to “Siberian Demon Dwarves.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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