Guest Post: Deep Freeze Thrillers

A break from increasingly scarce Wendy blathering today - with a guest post from Bat Cave Friend, TBR Challenge Participant, and all around good egg, Janet W!  Since the start of the new year I've been glomming on to suspense reads and Janet's dynamite post is sure to send a chill (the good kind!) into the heart of suspense fans everywhere.  Enjoy!

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What’s the appeal of wintery thrillers set in the interior of Alaska or Canada’s Yukon Territory? Consider that the temperature in February ranges between an average high of 8°F and a low of -13°F. That’s bone-chilling cold. During the winter solstice, there are less than four hours of daylight per day. Poets, novelists, and artists—often depicting the Aurora Borealis—have shaped how we envision winter in the vast and mostly unpopulated far north. The crux of Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire,” is the eternal conflict of man against nature. In London’s frozen Yukon, a vulnerable man is someone who doesn’t respect the power of nature. 

But all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all--made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

Three novels—Nora Roberts’s Northern Lights, Kelley Armstrong’s A Stranger in Town, and Dark Night by Paige Shelton—illustrate why the North makes a hospitable, albeit frigid, locale for murder. 

Northern Lights strikes some universal themes. The first, that moving north of the Lower 48 is often an escape and refuge from painful events. Baltimore cop Nate Burke accepts a job as police chief of Lunacy Alaska. In his rearview mirror is a dead partner and a divorce: he can’t get far enough away to start again. To escape being labeled a cheechako (a term that used to describe “a person newly arrived in the mining districts of Alaska or northwestern Canada” and now defines newcomers to Alaska and the Yukon), you must embrace the great outdoors. Nate decides to take up snowshoeing. The alternative is holing up for the winter with an ample supply of whiskey and firewood. Another theme is that loners like being alone and are unfazed by winter’s vicissitudes. There’s a tension between escaping the past and embracing a new community in a northern setting. Nora Roberts, an oft underrated author, addresses this very effectively in the person of Nate Burke, a new lawman who uncovers a decades-dead frozen body early in his tenure. His new girlfriend, bush pilot Meg, is the daughter of the dead man. Her approach to justice has a tinge of the Wild West. 

I believe in payback. For the little things, for the big ones. For everything in between. Letting people screw you over is just lazy and uncreative.

The theme of escaping one’s past is also addressed in Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series. Rockton, a fictional town near Dawson City, Yukon Territory, is “a haven for those running from their pasts.” 

Trouble always seems to find Detective Casey Duncan and her boyfriend and boss Sheriff Eric Dalton, particularly when they’re off-piste, looking for some R&R in the wilderness surrounding Rockton.

Rockton is a closed community, completely hidden from scrutiny. To escape traditional retribution, criminals pay inordinately large sums of money and serve their “sentence” in relative comfort, climate extremes notwithstanding. The town of Rockton is analogous to an open prison except, like the British TV series The Prisoner, only the folks who keep the lights on and the trains running are allowed to leave (to get supplies and access the internet). The final Rockton book, The Deepest of Secrets, will be published in February 2022. 

Dark Night, the third of Paige Shelton’s Alaska Wild mysteries, opens as winter is closing in. For Beth Rivers, who writes popular thrillers under the name Elizabeth Fairchild, the allure of the fictional town of Benedict is its remoteness. Folks in Benedict (a fictional town) respect one another’s privacy. Thin Ice was the first in Paige Shelton’s Alaska Wild mystery series. Beth arrives in two-person prop plane, on the run after escaping from a stalker who kidnapped her. She’s carved out a good life: Beth has a job, writing the weekly “one-sheet newspaper, the Petition,” a room “at the Benedict House, a halfway house for female felons,” and friends and acquaintances (like her almost boyfriend Tex). Only the police chief Gril Samuels knows her back-story, or so Beth supposes. Beth has a talent for detection. When a local is murdered outside the popular watering-hole, she can’t resist the allure of solving the puzzle. Was he murdered by a Benedict citizen or a newcomer? If the murderer is on the run, where do they hide, especially if they’re from the lower forty-eight? Most outsiders don’t have the wherewithal to prepare adequately for the extreme conditions. 

To enjoy a mystery set in Alaska or the Yukon, you don’t have to prepare for frigid temperatures and almost 24/7 darkness. You can curl up with a hot chocolate in front of a fire while you enjoy these stories. Unlike the hero of Robert Service’s famous poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” you may shiver in fear but you won’t be cold!

Guest Review: Good Girls Lie

Today the Bat Cave is hosting guest reviewer Janet Webb who many of you know from her writing at Heroes & Heartbreakers (RIP), Criminal Element, and as a longtime resident of Romancelandia. Welcome Janet! 

The title Good Girls Lie is a play on words since the girls who attend The Goode School in Marchburg, Virginia are bound by a strict honor code: the stricture against lying is listed first. The school and the town are both fictional although J.T. Ellison is an alumna of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia (class of ’91). Ellison said she has “woven pieces of the school’s legends and tragedies into this story, all put through my own creative lens.”

The first chapter is entitled The Hanging. Ellison paints a horrifying picture—the opposite of how you might imagine a pastoral, purposeful prep school.

The girl’s body dangles from the tall, iron gates guarding the school’s entrance. A closer examination shows the ends of a red silk tie peeking out like a cardinal on a winter branch, forcing her neck into a brutal angle. She wears her graduation robe and multicolored stole as if knowing she’ll never see the achievement. 

The scene quickly shifts back in time to the arrival of Ash Carlisle, a new student from Oxford, England. Dean Westhaven welcomes Ash into her inner sanctum and asks her over a perfectly prepared cup of Oolong tea if she remembers the words of the Honor Pledge. Ash dutifully recites it.

“I will hold myself and my fellow students to the highest standards. I pledge absolute honesty in my work and my personal relationships. I will never take a shortcut to further my own goals. I will not lie, I will not cheat, I will not steal. I will turn myself in if I fail to live up to this obligation, and I will encourage those who break the code in any way to report themselves as well. I believe in trust and kindness, and the integrity of this oath. On my honor.” 

A classic mystery trope is the stranger entering an environment that is rich with long-standing traditions and customs. What is more hide-bound than an elite girls boarding-school? Think of The Official Preppy Handbook: fitting in at a boarding school is all about knowing and following the unspoken rules, be it clothing, manners, or the all-important who you know and where you’re from. Ash is worried “about fitting in with the daughters of the DC elite—daughters of senators and congressmen and ambassadors and reporters and the just plain filthy rich,” but she is “more than” pretty and as for her intelligence, she’s off the charts: “she’s both book smart and street-smart, the rarest of combinations.” Whilst Ash muses about her acceptability in a new environment, Ellison lays down a troubling marker.

Despite her concerns, if she sticks to the story, she will fit in with no issues. The only strike against her, of course, is me, but no one knows about me. No one can ever know about me.

What could this mean? Why does Dean Westhaven have to remind herself to call Ash by the last name Carlisle, instead of Carr? Troubling information like this is meted out in trickles but what really informs Good Girls Lie is the dichotomy between everything the school publicly represents and the actions of the girls behind the gates. The Goode School is known colloquially as a “Silent Ivy,” a sobriquet that plays on the school’s phenomenal acceptance rate at the Ivy Leagues. Of each class of graduates, “a full 90 percent go traditional Ivy.”

It is a laudable record. Goode accepts only the best, guarantees a serious return on investment. And in turn, expects blood, sweat, and tears. And future endowments. Elitism costs. 

“Blood, sweat, and tears.” That’s a rather harsh description of high school, albeit a demanding girls-only prep school but Ash discovers the truth of it early on. Exhausted after dragging a huge suitcase up two flights of stairs, she looks at her information packet to find out the number of her room. It’s 214. A group of girls “point to the left as one, a flock of helpful, smiling little birds.” At the end of the hall, she finds the number written on a piece of paper, taped to a door. It’s a thoroughly gothic introduction to boarding school life.

Steeling myself, I open the door into…darkness. A heady, musty smell, overlaid with bleach. Across the room are two cobwebbed windows covered in smeary, dotted dirt. The floor is draped in tarps; neatly stacked ladders line the far wall, a row of paint cans in front of them. A fluorescent light swings from the ceiling. When I flip the switch, it comes to life with an ominous crackle. 

That’s not all Ash hears—outside the door are “peals of laughter.” Really? “Oh, ha, bloody ha,” she thinks. But isn’t hazing of new students traditional? Or is this an indication of how things are going to be? Ash’s insularity, combined with her British background, make it impossible for her to escape notice. She is quickly targeted by her fellow students, particularly Becca, a member of the senior class. Becca is a natural leader, luminous, intelligent, and brilliant at blowing hot and cold at Ash. Becca and her followers quickly uncover the mystery of Ash’s mysterious background although Ellison deftly inserts clues that indicate that there’s much more to Ash than meets the eye.

The “hanging” marks a shift in the plot, from uncomfortable scenes of bullying and competition to dark secrets and downright terror. A paragraph describing Good Girls Lie takes on a frightening resonance: “In a world where appearances are everything, as long as students pretend to follow the rules, no one questions the cruelties of the secret societies or the dubious behavior of the privileged young women who expect to get away with murder.” Getting away with murder in this venue means more than scamming someone or something and getting off scot free—at The Goode School, murder is brutal and inexplicable. Good Girls Lie is a complicated, absorbing tale that is painted in morally ambiguous shades of grey, not black and white.

Guest Review: Summer on Mirror Lake

Today the Bat Cave is hosting guest reviewer Janet Webb who many of you know from her writing at Heroes & Heartbreakers (RIP), Criminal Element, and as a longtime resident of Romancelandia. Welcome Janet!

Honeymoon Harbor is a romance destination worth visiting—it’s a vibrant Pacific Northwest community, complete with a long-ago Romeo/Juliet*esque family feud, gorgeous brothers, to-die-for scenery, and plots that gently wind themselves around the heart strings. Summer on Mirror Lake is the 3rd Honeymoon Harbor book. Herons Landing #1 and Snowfall on Lighthouse Lane #2 are the first two book in the series. It reminds me of Debbie Macomber’s Pacific Northwest series (a compliment, believe me!) because earlier characters don’t disappear after they get their HEA: they are woven into the plot. (N.B. what really packs a wallop, the pointed brother to brother advice.)

Gabriel (Gabe) Mannion is the second oldest Mannion son, destined from birth to compete with his over-achieving older brother Quinn (former hot-shot lawyer, now crafts beer entrepreneur extraordinaire). Gabe did not expect to collapse at the funeral of his mentor but hey, who would? Where to recover and recuperate?

When he lands in the emergency room after collapsing at the funeral of a colleague and friend, Wall Street hotshot Gabriel Mannion initially rejects the diagnosis of an anxiety attack. But when warned that if he doesn’t change his adrenaline-fueled, workaholic lifestyle he could end up like his friend, Gabe reluctantly returns to his hometown of Honeymoon Harbor to regroup. 

Gabe reluctantly admits “that everybody had their limits,” and he decides to go for a run each morning along a lakeshore trail and visit Quinn’s bar each night to drink away his chagrin at having a life-plan interruptus. He knows that second chances don’t come along all that often. And in case we missed it, JoAnn Ross slyly reminds us of the quintessential second chance story.

But it wasn’t too late. He figured that ER doc was more like Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Future. He hadn’t revealed what would happen. Only what could. Gabe was perfectly capable of changing his fate. All he had to do was make a plan. It wasn’t all that different from analyzing financial data. 

What could go wrong? Gabe is a man with a plan and everyone in Honeymoon Harbor knows he’s richer than God. The problem with drinking at Quinn’s bar is that after two weeks Quinn tells it to him straight: “You do realize that you’re driving customers away.” Come again? But Quinn’s right, the bar isn’t as busy as it was when he first came to town. Of course, Gabe denies that it has anything to do with him but Jarle Biornstad, Quinn’s Norwegian giant of a cook, agrees: “The edgy vibe radiating off you is scaring people away.” They tell him how to fill his “days of leisure.” He should build a boat, something he loved to do before he went away to college. Specifically, a Viking faering.

“Even if I wanted to, which I haven’t said I do, it’d be a push to get a decent-size one done in three months.” Which was his deadline. By then he’d be rested, at his fighting weight and ready to get back into the fray.  

“Because your summer schedule is so booked.”  

Gabe gave him a hard stare. “You’re pushing me.”  

“Just saying,” Quinn said mildly. That was a funny thing about the eldest Mannion. Gabe couldn’t remember his older brother ever yelling, or even raising his voice. Yet, somehow, just like his dad, who was the quieter of his parents, he always got his way, always made things happen. 

Quick aside to JoAnn Ross: when is Quinn’s story coming down the pike because I’m more than ready!

I’m sure readers are more than ready to meet the heroine of Summer on Mirror Lake. Chelsea Prescott, head librarian and friend to all, faces life with a determinedly glass-half-full attitude. That’s her choice. Her childhood slid into tragedy after her younger sister died and her doctor dad left the family. Her mother died when Chelsea was in college—police called it an accidental overdose, but Chelsea saw it as a slow, tragic suicide. Honeymoon Harbor’s library was her safe place and former head librarian Lillian Henderson was her second mother. Chelsea may have stepped into Lillian’s shoes, but she’s determined to put her own stamp on the job. The Summer Readers’ Adventure group is Chelsea’s pet project—she not only wants kids to delve into books during the summer, she’s planning field trips to enhance the curriculum. What would match up better with a “Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book on northern myths” than a visit to see an actual Viking ship under construction? Brianna, a good friend of Chelsea, and the only Mannion sister, spills the beans, although she warns her girlfriend “not to get your hopes up.”

"He’s been a loner out at the lake, and extremely noncommunicative even with us. I have the feeling something significant happened in New York, but if anyone knows what it was, it’d be Quinn, and he’s not talking." 

Everybody knew that Quinn Mannion held secrets as tightly as a priest hearing a confession at St. Peter the Fisherman’s church. Which was why he undoubtedly knew personal things about most people in Honeymoon Harbor.  

“Well, it wouldn’t hurt to ask,” she decided. “All he can do is say, no, right?”  

“Right. And good luck. Quite honestly, I think it’s be as good for him as it would be fun for the kids.” 

A week or so later, Chelsea tracks down Gabe in a “back corner of the Honeymoon Harbor wooden boat-building school.” He doesn’t remember her although he has fond memories of Lillian Henderson. Chelsea tells him that Mrs. Henderson is on the advisory board.

“I didn’t realize libraries had advisory boards.”  

“Many do.” Twin dimples appeared in her cheeks as she smiled. She was, as his grandfather Harper would say, cute as a button. Even as her naughty librarian glasses had him imagining unbuttoning a few more of those buttons, Gabe reminded himself that he didn’t do cute. 

And he doesn’t do boat-building tours, telling her it’s a liability issue. Chelsea protests: “Even if I promise that they won’t touch a thing?” “Even then,” Gabe says and if you think that’s the end of it, you need to read more romance.

Summer on Mirror Lake is my favorite of the Honeymoon Harbor series because the protagonists are so different, yet they’re absolutely made for each other. Even when they resolve their difficulties over boat visits and decide to have a secret summer fling (that everyone in town knows about), the end of August looms like a big dark storm cloud. Everyone knows Gabe’s real home is the gold-paved canyons of Wall Street—or is it? JoAnn Ross never disappoints—take this to the beach and enjoy.