Much has changed on Mount Everest in recent years. This is the first book to detail how the recent infusion of wealth into the mountains is reacting with the age-old lust for glory to draw crime to the highest places on the planet, and how a mountain's ability to reduce climbers to their essential selves is revealing villains as well as heroes, greed as well as selflessness. The change is caused both by a tremendous boom in traffic to the world's mountains and a new class of parasitic and predatory adventurer. Beatings, thefts, drugs, prostitution, coercion, threats, and abandonment on the highest slopes of Everest and other mountains have become the rule rather than the exception, and journalist Kodas describes many of these experiences and explores the larger issues they raise with thriller-like intensity.--From publisher description.