The Dead of Winter

The third compulsive mystery in the Blackwater Bay series from Paula Gosling, author of Monkey Puzzle and winner of the CWA Golden Dagger.

Blackwater Bay has frozen over for the season, now a place for the idle reverie of the town's sporting fishermen – and local teacher Jess Gibbons is stuck, gloomy about the sorry state of her life. So when a corpse floats up into an ice hole one morning, the intense shock is enough to shake her out of it.

Soon, Sheriff Matt Gabriel's team confirm the body to be a mob-connected New York ex-con, who could have been in the area to carry out a hit – and Blackwater's quiet streets threaten to be submerged by a ravenous media circus.

Then, as a girl from the local high school goes missing, the puzzle deepens. She was one of Jess's pupils, and her disappearance is inexplicable. Though – she was recently cautioned for drug use. Could this be a factor?

As the community prepares for its annual Ice Festival, Matt and Jess work to unravel these mysterious events. Could the two cases be connected? Who did the ex-con want to kill? And will Jess sort her life out in time for the wife-sliding competition?

Weaving diverse strands together with great wit and ingenuity, this is another hugely entertaining slice of murder and mystery in the Great Lakes.

The Dead of Winter is the third book in the Blackwater Bay series. The series continues with Death and Shadows.