The Cutoff

The tragedy of the Donner Party belongs to California's past - until a dead girl is found by the infamous lake and the horror begins again.
The body mutilated, throat cut, flesh butchered from her thigh. A savage onslaught that echoes history – 1846, an emigrant wagon train trapped by fierce snowstorms, pioneers forced to winter without food and falling to desperate measures: cannibalism and murder.
For two men, the killing will unlock their past: Lee Wall, a disgraced cop, and Pat Dollarhide, father of the dead girl. Their fate lies bound with Frank Vines, a cancer-ridden parolee with a corroding desire for revenge. The Cutoff leads all three into a showdown high on the same mountain where the westward pioneers once descended into hell, the living eating the dead.