Q&A with I.M. Aiken, Author of Stolen Mountain

I.M. Aiken draws on her decades of experience in emergency medicine to shape Stolen Mountain, blending lived reality with a fast-paced mystery set in rural Vermont. Inspired by real cases of small-town corruption, the novel explores how power, deception, and loyalty collide in close-knit communities.

Buy the book here.

Book Description: Nothing is as wicked (or mean) as massive small town malfeasance.

EMS Captain turned sleuth Brighid Doran suspects that all is not what it appears on the surface at The

Branston Club — a swanky ski lodge being built in her rural Vermont town. While dodging danger and digging up dirt, Brighid faces the ire of small town politics, crooked cops, and an ever deepening hole of deceptions, all the while struggling to cope with the constant deployment of her wife Major Sarah (Sam) Ann Musgrave. With help from attorney Morgan Chadwick and a hovering FBI, Brighid must determine the truth of a scheme with the potential of defrauding her friends and neighbors of millions… but at what cost to her own relationships and where she calls home?

Stolen Mountain is part of The Trowbridge Vermont Series, which includes The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County (2024) and The Trowbridge Dispatch (2025), a collection of short stories.

Author Bio: I.M. Aiken worked on ambulances off and on since the 1980s, starting in the Boston area where she was born and raised. She is the author of The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, a Trowbridge Vermont Novel, and served one tour in Iraq as a civilian member of the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division. I. M. Aiken now lives in Vermont.

1. What was your main inspiration behind Stolen Mountain?
   

My main inspiration behind Stolen Mountain is the simple fact that a lot of the story happened near here. There was a fraud case involving a small hill called Haystack in Dover and Wilmington, Vermont. This guy came in with all the promises that the bad guy in Stolen Mountain did. He promised to rebuild the local little airport and bought inns, restaurants, and private properties everywhere. He made huge promises to turn a sleepy private ski hill into a major draw for millionaires and billionaires, and, of course, he defaulted. Or ran away. Or committed fraud.

The point is, this guy did all the things in this book, and then walked away with unpaid bills and pockets full of cash, and screwed any local involved in the building trades or real estate, and he seemed to sucker in a lot of the local politicians and civic leaders.

In northern Vermont, at roughly the same time, there was a massive fraud and conspiracy at a resort known as Jay Peak, which also seems to own Burke Mountain in the Northeast Kingdom. This fraud involved international monies and the sale of visas, like permanent resident visas for foreigners, if they invested a huge amount of money. These people were very happy to invest a huge amount of money, and they didn’t give one poopy poop if the project actually went through because they were in their own mind buying an American passport through a visa called EB5.

2. Did you pull from any personal experience when writing about the life of a seasoned EMT?
   

I do pull from personal experiences when writing about emergency medicine. I first became an EMT when I was about 18, and worked in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for about five years starting at about the age of 20. It was my summer job during college, and then it was my landing spot after graduating. I got another career going, but it seemed to keep intersecting with medicine, which included a pretty good stint with the US Public Health Service in Alaska. After the whole 9/11 mess, I got pretty pulled into the Department of Defense, which resulted in me spending years traveling the globe and then a year in Iraq from 2005 to 2006.

My life started settling down in 2007, which is the year that my mother died. At about that time, I went back and retook my EMT, then earned my paramedic, and then my critical care paramedic.

As a paramedic in southern Vermont, I served on numerous committees, worked for half a dozen ambulance services, and spent years supporting the communities where I live as both a paramedic and firefighter. By this time, I was in my 40s and 50s. So yes, a lot of the stories come from my lived experiences, and a few, like the short story of rubber duckies, were given to me by friends to retell.

3. Stolen Mountain is part of the Trowbridge Vermont series. What was the experience like in continuing the series?

It’s hard for me to think of Trowbridge Vermont as a series. Trowbridge Vermont provides me with an environment, a context, and a suite of characters to work from. I’ve got Alex Flynn, Bridget Doran, Sam Musgrave, Al, Harry, Regina, and the others that you see through the stories. I’ve positioned the various characters at the forefront of narratives so that this author can experience and explore stories from other perspectives.

Unlike a series, I don’t feel obliged to keep the stories and characters operating chronologically. I feel free to jump back and forth in time as the stories come to me. Does that make sense?

4. Did you run into any unexpected challenges?

Well, when I went back to redraft, I couldn’t find hundreds of photos that I swore my niece and I took when we were playing investigator at the construction sites. I found enough of the photos, but some of the ones I really had hoped to find for publicity weren’t there, which is only my fault.

The other challenge that I faced is that, as I wrote about and studied this alleged bad guy (he has a name, I just won’t use it), he reminded me of a very well-known real estate developer who was famous in New York during the 80s and 90s. This developer used the same techniques—mobster-like belligerence, failure to pay vendors, threatening contractors, and suing them continuously. There was a playbook that was well-known to folks in the Northeast and eventually throughout the country.

This guy may later have had a television show? And may yet be involved in politics. I didn’t really want to write about that guy. And the further I got into the story, the more my antagonist looked like him. I needed to diverge the story from my antagonist because I just didn’t want to write about that guy. That was a challenge.

I had to take the ending for a little bit of a walk. While doing so, I buried a few Easter eggs along the way.

5. Your writing incorporates so many details about the setting that it almost feels like a character itself. Was this intentional, and how do you think the setting influences the storyline and the characters’ actions?

I am a New Englander. I lived a lot of my adult life away from here. I lived in Wisconsin and Alaska. I traveled globally, and wherever I was, I missed New England. I missed New England soil. I missed New England forests. I missed the smell of New England.

As an aside to this, I hear a lot of comments about so-and-so being a great Southern writer or somebody being a great Western writer. And that’s not something I’ve heard a lot about New England. “Oh, that author really encapsulated New England and the New England spirit.”

There was an oral storyteller who traveled New England when I was a youth, and he did stories about Bert & I. His name was Marshall Dodge. He dropped out of Yale at some point to pursue storytelling and would sit behind a mic on a stage, telling stories with wonderful accents that brought Down East Main alive with his tales. There is a dying accent in rural Vermont. In fact, a variety of accents throughout rural New England. There was a distinctive accent along the Connecticut River in New Hampshire and Vermont. There is that Down East accent. There is a northern Vermont accent that sounds a bit French and Canadian, for obvious reasons. The story of the people of New England is a very old one, and I relish it. My family has been here since a rather famous ship landed on the shores of Massachusetts in 1620. My ancestor came ashore in a cradle. He was the first person born on a British ship in coastal America.

One of the classic things you learn when watching Jeopardy is that if the host asks about a Southern author, the first answer you should offer is Faulkner. But I don’t know what that answer would be if you’re asked about a New England writer. Mark Twain has roots here, but he’s really from Missouri. Frost is also well recognized as a New England poet. From what I’ve been reading, Vermont seems to have more authors per capita than any other US state. I don’t know if that’s factual, but we have a very low population and a large number of authors.

Therefore, I deliberately wanted to identify my writing as New England and incorporate New England and its history into the stories as a character.

6. What was the process like for writing a mystery with so many practical details? Did you have a system for keeping track of them, and were there any aspects that proved particularly challenging?

I need to outline. I have an outlining tool. I also take some notes. Furthermore, I have a three-ring binder that includes the biographies of the major characters, and in the book, is essentially the rank progression of Sam, as she goes from private to, presently, Lieutenant Colonel. There is also a picture of what her ribbons would look like on her dress uniform—an inventory of her medals and awards from the military.

Because I include so much EMS and local stuff, I don’t have to keep track of that. I know my characters and how they behave, and they take care of that for me. I tend to start a novel with a few opening chapters and a vague idea, then I stop and flesh out an outline so that I know where things are going. I have observed, however, that very complicated plots are hard for me to follow—even when watching television or reading books.

I use stories in the evening as a way of calming down. It is the beginning of my sleep routine, and it reminds me of some unknown olden-day family sitting around a fire telling oral stories as folks start nodding off. That’s where I picture the stories of Boudicca, Hercules, Thor, and the Wendigo being told. I am significantly more interested in the people, the relationships, and the land, with less interest in the plot. I need there to be a plot, and I need it to be interesting, but the plot is secondary.

If you look at One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade just keeps telling stories. Each is interesting. And that’s a good goal! Keep people entertained, keep people engaged, but allow them to disconnect a bit from the worries of their own day and work toward a comfortable night’s sleep. That’s what I want from a story.

7. Can you talk about your decision to include Sam’s journals in the story? How was the experience of switching POVs while writing them?

The secret about Sam’s journals, as you’ll find in the next novel called Captain Henry, is that they are variations of my own journals from Iraq. During 2006, when I was there, I worked twelve-hour shifts six days a week and a six-hour shift on the seventh, but I continued to write. I didn’t write every day because sometimes we were called out in the middle of the night to chase down the mission, but I wrote, and those words provide me with that other point of view.

8. Were there any scenes or plot points that evolved significantly from your original draft? How did the story change during writing?

   
   

The story and the plot did change as I wrote the drafts. Mentioned above, the bad guy in the story was using somebody else’s playbook—the playbook of a famous developer. The more I researched this guy, the less I wanted to tell that story. Somewhere, three-quarters of the way through the book, I needed to find a way out because when I started this story, that guy was barely in the news, and by the time I finished the novel, he was a little more prominent.

I didn’t need my story to be wrapped up in U.S. and international political stuff. I just wanted a little mystery that takes place on a ski hill in Vermont.

9. What was your intention in the scene where Brighid shows empathy toward the young man who was drunk driving, and how does it reveal her moral compass or emotional depth?

You know, by the time drunks smash into shit, you have to recognize that they are victims. You don’t know why they are drunks, but alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholism is a trap, and folks who drive drunk and smash into shit are most likely alcoholics. By the time you have somebody calm down, and you’re looking at them as your patient, the only judgment you should really be making is how to care for a fellow human being. How to care for their injuries and how to care for their well-being. One way or another, that person is in your legal custody. As such, you have both a legal and moral obligation to care for them.

Well, being in the back of an ambulance as a patient does not constitute legal custody as you would think of following an arrest. When working with drunk-driving incidents or other violence, it is often probable that your patient is also about to face criminal charges. They know it, and you know it. So whether they are handcuffed or not, you have the mandate to improve their situation.

Blaming victims, being violent toward victims, or harassing victims will never make things better. 

This is also true with the occasional criminals you run into. Kindness and sympathy will keep everyone safer. Violence, anger, blame, distrust, and neglect will almost always make things worse.

10. When Sam is arrested, Brighid doesn’t appear overly emotional. Can you talk about this choice and what aspects of her character make her respond in a hardened or restrained way?

The thing about playing in the world of medical-legal activities, such as being an EMT on the street and working shoulder-to-shoulder with cops and firefighters every day, is that it’s a funny world. You are an insider to the workings of the mechanisms most people never see. Sam is a licensed police officer with a long history of being a military police officer, and has the experience of knowing her own rights and that she is, in fact, in control. That is the faith that Brighid has.

It is akin to stumbling upon a dead body or crime scene and not having the horror present first, but instead the understanding. As an EMT or paramedic, you have a job to do. You’ve seen this hundreds of thousands of times. You’re a professional, and it is your job to manage the scene, bring the resources, and move the crisis forward. That experience pulls a lot of the normal civilian tears and angst that folks might have if they didn’t have that experience.

11. The novel touches on issues like corruption, profiling, and discrimination. How did you approach weaving these real-world issues into the story without overshadowing the mystery?
    

You’re asking how I approached weaving real-world issues into the novel, a mystery. The question may, in fact, be backwards: How do I tell real-world stories and address core social issues? What kind of vessel do I need to tell these stories? I find mysteries and thrillers a way of bringing that forward.

I get really frustrated with stories that wander so far off the truth or reality that I’ve lost credibility. That’s not of interest. I don’t need to know the fanciest gun, the biggest boom, or the greatest tech. Stories about people, and the poop they go through, and how they get through it.

12. How do you hope readers respond to the ethical dilemmas and social commentary presented in the book?
    

What I’d like is for readers to recognize themselves or others in these stories. I find that most people don’t really know how the fire service and the emergency medical services work. While most people in the U.S. are served by paid EMTs or paramedics, most communities in the U.S. are not. Most communities in the U.S. are rural, given that most of our land is rural, and where there’s land, there are people. In those remote rural places, people still need the services provided by 911, which means the fire and EMS services are often provided by unpaid volunteers.

While I’m proud of being an unpaid volunteer for much of my life, we are facing an upcoming disaster. The model of expecting unpaid volunteers to rush toward danger at any hour of the day is failing. It is failing because many of these communities have aging populations, because they don’t have local employment anymore, and because they are based on small farms and small businesses, which are failing. Therefore, the people committed to farms and small businesses must commute to jobs elsewhere, meaning you can’t just step off your tractor, jump into a truck, and rescue a neighbor.

In Vermont, at present, our local rescue squad never gets state police response to car accidents anymore. There just aren’t enough police. Is it fair to say that 911 in Vermont has been failing for at least a decade, maybe two?

At a point when people want lower taxes, and the cost of everything is going up, it seems like a hardship to ask Americans to pay for medical care and emergency services. But without that pay, EMTs and paramedics will not be able to respond to a neighbor on a random Tuesday afternoon.