Nothing is wider than the space between people, as Nicholas Evans has discovered in his new novel, The Divide.

His latest story stretches from Manhattan to Santa Fe and back into the heart of the Rocky Mountains to paint an ambitious, if overreaching, portrait of a fractured family. To describe the myriad ways that love goes wrong, Evans has reached deep into his stylistic repertoire.

Evans, most famously author of The Horse Whisperer, begins The Divide with a mystery. A father and son skiing together in Montana's backcountry stumble upon a young woman, broken by a fall and dead in the pristine snow. Her name is Abbie Cooper, a young student turned eco-terrorist made world famous not only by her affair with a vicious radical but also by her part in the murder of a corporate oilman's son.

There's huge potential for drama here, and Evans takes advantage of some of those opportunities and squanders others.

He introduces Charlie Riggs, for example, a rugged sheriff struggling to find time between his estranged wife, young daughter, and a cold, lonely job patrolling the wilds of Montana. But just as quickly, Evans loses track of the character.

We also meet Ben and Sarah Cooper, Abbie's parents, who have retreated to their corners not just to heal but also to contemplate the disappearance of their only daughter. Ben has taken solace with another woman in picturesque Santa Fe, and Sarah has run to Venice, where she finds her loneliness has followed her.

While both parents are meticulously drawn, the pressure to discover what led Abbie to her early grave overwhelms Ben and Sarah's painstakingly detailed former lives.

Evans is largely concerned with inquiry, not action. He flashes back to the end of the Coopers' marriage, as they carry their respective baggage to The Divide, an isolated but luxurious ranch high in the Montana wilderness. Sarah's resentment drives away Ben, who takes solace in an affair. Meanwhile, their son Josh suffers the indignities of adolescence while Abbie has discovered the grace of the mountains with Ty, a local ranch hand.

When the marriage disintegrates, family members suffer in their own, individual, ways. Ben finds guilt and release in running away from his family; Sarah's suffering turns to blame and recrimination, and Josh finds himself stuck in a drug-fueled confusion.

Abbie, however, takes the most dramatic turn for the worse. Fleeing New York, she veers into uncharted territory at the University of Montana when she joins a half-hearted environmental group and discovers "monkey wrenching" - the sabotage of corporate machinery, inspired by Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.

She becomes witness to the violence at the WTO protests in Seattle, and her path becomes inescapably linked with Rolf, a crudely portrayed but effective villain.

The wreckage of a family amid such beauty can be fertile ground, as demonstrated by novelists like Pat Conroy, who richly captures his love-hate relationship with the South. Yet The Divide, despite its promising setup, never reaches its potential. A righteous infusion of crisp dialogue would have helped break up wearying descriptions that make up the bulk of the book.

In addition, the subplots and characters are always secondary to the main question: What happened to Abbie Cooper? When Abbie isn't present, the story derails, as if it were her presence alone holding the story together.

Ultimately, everything comes to a rushed close, with characters surfacing in unlikely ways, including Ty and Charlie Riggs, who are brought back to tie off the story's loose ends in an awkward conclusion.

Taken as a whole, The Divide becomes a splintered entity itself. Evans has stretched far and wide, trying to capture a story bigger than his previous work. Unfortunately, The Divide may be a mystery, a drama and a travelogue tangled up in one volume, but the sum of its parts never adds up to a compelling whole.

Clayton Moore is a freelance writer living in Centennial.