The Boy in the Snow

M. J. McGrath

04 June 2015
9781447271963
416 pages

Synopsis

The gripping second novel in M. J. McGrath's Edie Kiglatuk Arctic crime series.

When Arctic guide Edie Kiglatuk stumbles across a body abandoned in the Alaskan forest, she little imagines what her discovery will lead her to.

With the local police convinced the death is linked to the Dark Believers, a sinister Russian sect, Edie's friends insist she leave the investigation to the proper authorities. But remaining in the area as part of the support team for her ex-husband Sammy's bid to win the famous Iditarod dog sled race, Edie cannot get the image of the frozen corpse out of her mind.

While Sammy travels across some of world's toughest and most deadly terrain, Edie sets off on an investigation which will take her into a dark world of politics, corruption and greed - as a painful secret in her past finally catches up with her . . .

‘Half-Inuit Edie, who debuted in White Heat, here finds herself at mortal risk from the cold, so masterfully described that it chills the reader. McGrath adds an element of Inuit spirituality to this fast-moving mystery of corruption and cover-ups, meeting expectations established by the compelling series opener’ Booklist
'Acknowledged as one of our most gifted younger writers, McGrath’s first thriller - featuring Arctic guide Edie Kiglatuk - was the exceptional White Heat, published last year to deserved acclaim. This second confirms just how good this Essex-born writer with a taste for Alaska really is . . . The snow-laden wastes of Alaska are so brilliantly evoked that it almost make you shiver reading it, and the plot is every bit as chilling, laced as it is with politics, sects and modern greed' Daily Mail
The Boy In The Snow is a thrilling chiller . . . Wrap up warmly. M. J. McGrath's earlier Arctic-set outing White Heat may have borrowed its title from an old James Cagney film but was in every other respect a totally original piece of work, demonstrating for a first novel an authoritative grasp of the thriller idiom. That book made people sit up and take notice but inevitably raised expectations for its successor. Has McGrath managed to match her achievement with The Boy In The Snow, the second book to feature her female Inuit hunter turned sleuth Edie Kiglatuk? . . . As anybody who has read McGrath's earlier book will know she is an author with a quietly impressive command of character. Edie is a heroine with whom it is extremely easy to identify, however alien her lifestyle will be to most of us. Yet the author's real skill is in the astonishing evocation of the frigid landscape, along with the sharply conjured details of Inuit life. What's more, McGrath is able to keep all these elements satisfyingly balanced, even as the tormented past of Edie begins to invade the present. The burying of secrets in both the physical and metaphorical sense in a snowbound landscape is hardly a new idea but McGrath makes us feel we are encountering it for the first time. This is turning into a series that readers will want to follow with close attention’ Barry Forshaw, Daily Express