The Snow Garden - Softcover

Born in San Francisco and raised in New Orleans from the age of ten, Christopher Rice published four New York Times bestsellers, received a Lambda Literary Award, and was declared one of People Magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive, all by the age of thirty. His debut novel, A Density of Souls, was greeted with a landslide of media attention, much of it an offshoot of his mother’s fame as a legendary vampire chronicler. His supernatural thriller The Heavens Rise was a Bram Stoker Award nominee. The InsightOut Book Club selected his book Blind Fall as a best novel of 2008. In addition, his noir thriller Light Before Day was hailed as a “book of the year” by Lee Child. He has served as a contributing columnist to The Advocate and has been published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon.com. His short fiction has been featured in the anthologies Thriller and Los Angeles Noir.

PROLOGUE

Inverness Creek

Groping at the icy tree trunks and pushing branches from his face, he followed the sound of water flowing against the ice until it brought him to the edge of Inverness Creek. The haggard elms stood in regiments along the sloping banks of ice-slick mud. Veils of snow danced on contrary gusts of wind before vanishing into ice punctuated by sudden black pools of creek water. The music of Fraternity Green was an eerie, distant suggestion far behind him. Bursts of drunken laughter and the delighted squeals of young women, underscored by the bass thud of a stereo, barely filtered through the thicket of trees to where he stood, steadying himself on a branch, staring down at Pamela Milford.

She was lying facedown on a sheet of ice that bobbed in the struggling current, her blonde hair fanned forward from her head. A few strands draped the side of her face where her cheek puffed against the upward press of the ice, the corner of her mouth open slightly as if she was trying to draw breath. One arm was pinned beneath her chest; the other was frozen in midreach for the far bank. Her right leg shot outward at an awkward angle from her body. A miniature geyser erupted around the toe of the boot on her left foot, water spilling over the top of the ice, a puncture that revealed the frailty of the sheet she lay on.

From this distance, the red trail extending out from her neck could easily have been mistaken for blood. He knew better.....