In November 1928, one year after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, a pair of newlyweds set out to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon in a homemade boat. Swept up by America's obsession with feats of daring, Glen and Bessie Hyde hoped to set a record—she would be the first woman to run that treacherous stretch of the Colorado River. A month later they vanished without a trace.

Based on the few known facts of Bessie and Glen Hyde's story, Grand Ambition is an account of the young lovers' journey, deftly braided with Glen's father's desperate efforts to find them. Written in lean and elegant prose, Grand Ambition is a tale of riveting suspense.

In her author's statement, Lisa Michaels explains her interest in writing a novel based on the Hydes' expedition: "I first read the story of Glen and Bessie Hyde in a history book. Their photograph, reproduced within the brief chapter, stopped me short: they were young and striking, wearing wool fedoras, bomber jackets with fur collars. The known facts of their story were scant and unsatisfying, but, from a writer's perspective, this seemed like a blessing. William Styron once said that historical novelists do best with 'thin rations.' And so where history left off, I decided to begin.

"The story of the Hydes' river journey seemed to give me the chance to examine both sides of an equation: the thrill of holding one's life into the wind, and the torturous worry of those left at home. The push and pull between caution and risk, parents and children, is universal. But doing research for Grand Ambition, I also came to believe that the craving for adventure waxes in certain times. Reading newspapers from the 1920s, I was struck between the parallels between that era and the present: both boom times, with enormous fortunes being made on the stock market. Both times of relative peace. We all claim to want peace and prosperity. But there's a kind of person who can't stand this dulling of the fight or flight reflexes. And to keep these instincts sharp, they dream up feats of daring. In the 1920s we had Lindbergh flying solo across the Atlantic, and Trudy Ederle, an eighteen-year-old girl, swimming the English Channel. The newspapers of the Jazz Age were full of breathless accounts of this society woman's 'adventurous honeymoon' barnstorming with her new husband, or that Arctic expedition. And today we have bungee jumping, 'Survivor', middle-aged accountants scaling peaks. It seems that when life is easy, people will make a hobby out of making it hard.

"Had Glen and Bessie Hyde been alive today, I imagine they might have tried to climb Mount Everest or race a hot-air balloon around the world. For myself, I have decided that I would rather read about adventure, or imagine it from the safety of a book-lined room."

Like The Perfect Storm on a whitewater river, or Into the Wild in the depths of Grand Canyon, this adventure / mystery / biography details the true story of Glen and Bessie Hyde, who vanished on their 1928 honeymoon river trip through Grand Canyon. When they did not appear at journey's end, Glen's father launched an exhaustive search of Grand Canyon. Although the boat was soon found upright and fully loaded, no trace of the honeymooners was ever found. They had vanished from the face of the earth. Or had they?

In the fall of 1971, an elderly widow joined a Grand Canyon rafting tour. Toward the end of the trip she announced she was Bessie Hyde, and that she had killed her husband, hiked out and started life anew. In 1976 a skeleton with a bullet in the skull was found at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Its size, age, and accoutrements all looked suspiciously like Glen Hyde's. In the following twenty years, yet another man and woman came to light, each surrounded by bizarre coincidences and suspected by some to be Glen or Bessie Hyde.

Flagstaff, Arizona, author Brad Dimock spent two years searching for the truth behind the Hyde mystery, digging through archives, traversing the continent, following each clue and lead to its end-even going to the extreme of replicating the Hydes' archaic scow and taking his own bride on a harrowing trip through Grand Canyon. His profusely illustrated book, Sunk Without a Sound, The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glen and Bessie Hyde, details the search and the findings in a riveting, often humorous style. Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the Arizona Highways Nonfiction Book Award.

Dimock, who spent more than twenty-five years as an international whitewater guide, spins a yarn as only someone who has stood around a thousand campfires can. His 1998 collaboration, The Doing of the Thing: The Brief, Brilliant Whitewater Career of Buzz Holmstrom, won the National Outdoor Book Award.