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"If you survive," he said, "we will have something in common. Something very rare. You see, I was in a similar situation myself once. I didn't freeze to death. But I must warn you. The cold can take away a piece of you. Not just your physical body. I mean inside you."
He opened the door, then stopped. The brutal air rushed in. I could feel my shirt freeze against my chest. "Once you freeze all the way through to your soul," he said, "you will never feel warm again. You'll see."  He closed the door, leaving me in the cold darkness."

Synopsis
Sequel to Hamilton's award-winning first novel (A Cold Day in Paradise), the story returns us to the small town of Paradise, Michigan where ex-Detroit police detective and reluctant private investigator, Alex McKnight, rents out small cabins to snowmobilers and tried to bury his demons under the snow he plows each day. Alex in content with his low-key existence, until a young Native American woman asks for his help – ostensibly to escape an abusive lover – and then disappears without a trace from one of his cabins. Feeling responsible, Alex begins a frantic search, swatting away his self-appointed “partner” – the town’s favorite fool – until the man surprises him. It’s a search that leads to encounters with a variety of unsavory types, each with his own agenda, and to some extremely unpleasant discoveries by McKnight himself as he forcibly learns that criminal sadism knows no geographic boundaries and that the motives of both good and evil people can lead to disaster.

Hamilton's crisp, evocative style and refreshingly genuine cast of characters cements his place among today’s most talented crime fiction writers. And his uniquely atmospheric rendering of place – especially the relentlessly frigid winter of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – will send a palpable shiver down the reader’s spine. Readers will want to bundle up and settle in.

Reviews

“In Alex McKnight’s rugged neck of the woods – a town called Paradise, right across from Canada, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – anything under a foot of snow is just ‘scattered flurries,’ and any fistfight that doesn’t require skin grafts qualifies ad civilized discourse. A firmer Detroit cop and failed private eye who drew first blood in Steve Hamilton’s strong debut mystery, ‘A Cold Day in Paradise,’ Alex returns…to duke it out with a roughneck team of hockey players whose postgame rituals extend to dealing drugs and beating up Indians. When an Ojibwa woman comes to Alex with a face full of bruises (and a bag full of dope) that she got from one of these guys. He offers he asylum in a cabin that he rents out to snowmobilers. But her subsequent kidnapping sends him back out in to the snow for a series of brutal encounters with amateur thugs, professional killers, dumb racists and even a few lawmen who don’t respect boundaries. It’s a cold, cruel world up here. (‘Once you freeze all the way through to your soul,’ Alex is advised, ‘you will never feel warm again.’) But Hamilton understands the border mentality, and his tensile rose – with its shirting images of heat and cold, light and ark – reflects the dramatic, often violent contradictions of people who live on the edge of the world."
-- The New York Times

"A most entertaining tale, peppered with wry humor and real, amusing characters. Hamilton presents a fast mystery brimming with insight into both politics of U.S./Canadian border crimes and the relations between Native Americans and their white neighbors."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"His protagonist is likeable as well as durable, his raffish cast sharply observed and entertaining. Moreover, he knows how to pace a story, something of a lost art in recent crime fiction."
-- Kirkus

"Pristine prose, independent protagonist, and ingenious plot. An inviting sequel to his Edgar Award-winning first novel."
-- Library Journal

“[This] is, start to finish, an excellent mystery….Although the reluctant-hero theme has been tackled many times in mystery fiction, Hamilton has found a new way to approach it.  Paradise, Michigan, the small-town setting of the novel, is the kind of place you’d like to visit (dress warmly), and McKnight is the kind of fellow you’d like to meet – he’s shake your hand, buy you a beer and, as long as you didn’t get on his wrong side, be your friend for life.  This is the kind of book you climb inside and, when you’re forced to leave, you wish you could stay a little longer.
-- Booklist

“This is a gripping, clever, beautifully rendered entertainment. McKnight is, in this editor’s opinion, one of the coolest American P.I.’s (probably because he doesn’t want to be one at all) since Parker’s Spenser started cracking clues back in the early ‘70’s. Simply a joy to read.  Winter of the Wolf Moon is a novel of redemption and spiritual rebirth masquerading as a novel of mystery and suspense. It is engaging, readable, and, in the end, surprisingly affecting, and it reinforces the notion that Steve Hamilton is – or could become – a significant new figure in American popular fiction.”
-- Barnes & Noble.com

“Characters are so well shaped they hit the scene breathing…”
-- South Florida Sun Sentinel

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