The Hounds of Winter - Hardcover

Magnuson, James

3.57

46 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292709900 ISBN 13: 9780292709904

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2005

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This psychological thriller by the award-winning novelist James Magnuson combines the moral acuity of Graham Greene with the twists and turns of the best Hitchcock films.

David Neisen came seeking reconciliation; what he found was a father's worst nightmare. Arriving on Christmas Eve to spend the holidays with his daughter Maya, he discovers her murdered on the floor of their cabin in the Wisconsin woods. He sees a ski-masked figure lurching through the snowdrifts behind the house and sets out in pursuit—only to transform himself into the prime suspect in his daughter's death.

Struggling to elude his pursuers in the fierce Wisconsin winter, Neisen must deal first with the ghosts of his past—a childhood tragedy that binds him to the small-town sheriff, the friends of his youth who must now choose to shelter or betray him, and the unresolved mysteries about the munitions plant where his father worked during the Korean War. And looming above it all is his growing certainty that his daughter was not who he thought she was. The answers lie hidden in "this Midwestern world of farmers and sons and daughters of farmers with their Christian forbearance and Scandinavian silences, their delicate kindnesses, this Cold War world, this white-bread world. It receded like the Ice Age had receded, leaving behind its own rubble, its broken citadels and buried secrets ...

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About the Author:

JAMES MAGNUSON is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including Windfall, Ghost Dancing, Open Season, and The Rundown. He is a former Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his fiction, and the winner of the Jesse Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Currently Magnuson directs the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

From Publishers Weekly:

As brooding and lethal as a Wisconsin winter storm, this taut thriller puts small-town relations into frightening relief. College senior Maya Neisen arrives a bit early to a Christmas reconciliation at a cabin in her father's hometown of Black Hawk, Wis., and is brutally murdered just minutes before her father, New York literary agent David Neisen, arrives. Finding his daughter slain, he hastily dials 911, then, hearing the screen door slam, chases a figure in a blue ski mask into the woods—to no avail. Returning to the cabin, he is confronted by sheriff Doug Danacek, who, after 35 years, still thinks David could have saved Danacek's brother from drowning. Noting Danacek's pants are wet up to his knees, and convinced that Danacek killed Maya as payback, David flees, steals the sheriff's Jeep and drives off, determined to find Maya's killer. Scrambling from pillar to post in the frozen wilderness, trying to find help among his old friends, David slowly uncovers a conspiracy among the denizens of the tiny, heavily Scandinavian backwater. While not terrific on the mechanics of the chase, Magnuson (Windfall; Ghost Dancing; etc.) keeps the psychological tension high, right up to the satisfying denouement. (Sept.)
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