A high-altitude thriller that will take your breath away—Cecily Wong is on her most dangerous climb yet, miles above sea level. But the elements are nothing compared to one chilling truth: There’s a killer on the mountain.

Journalist Cecily Wong is in over her head. She’s come to Manaslu, the eighth-highest peak in the world, to interview internationally famous mountaineer Charles McVeigh on the last leg of a record-breaking series of summits. She’s given up everything for this story—her boyfriend, her life savings, the peace she’s made with her climbing failures in the past—but it’s a career-making opportunity. It could finally put her life back on track.

But when one climber dies in what everyone else assumes is a freak accident, she fears their expedition is in danger. And by the time a second climber dies, it’s too late to turn back. Stranded on a mountain in one of the most remote regions of the world, she’ll have to battle more than the elements in a harrowing fight for survival against a killer who is picking them off one by one.

There’s something about a book set in a snowy, isolated place that always grabs me. Give me a group of people trapped somewhere remote while something sinister lurks among them during a snowstorm, and I’m all in. Naturally, when I saw that this was a murder mystery that takes place on one of the world’s highest peaks, I figured it would check every box. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

Cecily Wong, a journalist, joins an elite climbing expedition to Manaslu, the eighth-highest mountain in the world. She’s there to profile the famous mountaineer Charles McVeigh, but she’s also looking for redemption after a failed climb in her past. The stakes are clear: one wrong move could kill her. And when one of the team members dies under suspicious circumstances, she begins to suspect that the real danger might not be the altitude or the weather. It might be one of the climbers.

As I mentioned earlier, on paper, it’s exactly the kind of story I love. The isolation. The thin air. The ever-present sense of dread that should come from being stranded miles above civilization with a killer. I wanted the kind of creeping tension that settles in your bones, but for me, the suspense never quite landed.

I found the pacing to be slow. There was a ton of setup and it felt very repetitive. I was also never really sure where they were at any given moment because it all kind of read the same. Another problem was I never really connected with any of the side characters, so much so that there were times when I couldn’t remember who was who. Mostly because they all kind of felt the same to me.

Another problem that I had was that the twists didn’t twist, and by the time we reached the final showdown, I was mostly just ready for it all to be over. I was no longer invested. It’s not that the writing is bad. McCulloch is clearly talented, and she captures the brutal beauty of high-altitude climbing well, it’s just that the emotional momentum never builds. I never felt the claustrophobic fear or paranoia that a story like this needs.

That said, I can see this book appealing to a different kind of reader. If you like thrillers that take their time, ones that focus more on process and personal redemption than pure adrenaline, you might have a better time with it. The mountain setting is well-drawn, and the idea of a killer stalking climbers above the clouds is a great one. It just never lived up to the potential for me. I kept waiting for the story to go a little wild, to really lean into the psychological or the horror elements. Instead, it stayed safe and methodical. For a book titled Breathless, it was surprisingly calm.

Still, I don’t regret reading it. It’s always interesting to see how different authors approach isolation thrillers, and I appreciated that McCulloch brought her own mountaineering experience into the story. You can tell she knows her stuff. I just wish the tension matched the terrain. For me, it never found its footing.