Jo Silver comes to Dawson City just before freeze up and finds herself in the middle of the strange death of local politician Marlo McAdam.

Jo is a journalist and left Vancouver for a fresh start after a serial killer killed young women and she feels like it was her fault the last victim died. Very shortly after she arrives in Dawson City, a town in the Yukon, the body of Marlo McAdam is found dead and the police is knocking on Jo’s door. She though has hardly any memory of this particular night as she had a little too much to drink at the local pub.

The police has doubts her story that she can’t remember and treat her as a suspect so Jo decides to do her own research. She soon has to find out that nothing is as it seems and people behave strangely. She does not know what to think of the woman she shares the house with, is attracted to the man she was with the night of Marlo’s death yet can’t remember if anything happened between them. The editor of the local newspaper wants to keep this story out of the paper and the police officer in charge gives her strange signals.

After a second person goes missing and freeze up about to happen when the town is basically cut up from the rest of the world, Jo has to make up her mind if she wants to stay and find out more or return back to the relative safety of Vancouver.

I received this advanced copy from NetGalley and Dundurn Press for an honest review.

Normally this is not my kind of genre although I like to watch crime and mystery on TV so I don’t have too much I can compare this with reading wise. Anyway, I really liked the book because of its writing style, the characters, the setting and some things I really did not anticipate.

When I started it, one of my first thoughts due to the setting was: It kind of reminds me of the movie Whiteout. A movie I liked so I was excited.

I love that at the start of the story you don’t know much about any character and because it’s told from Jo’s perspective the reader only finds out what she does too. The reader has to piece the puzzle back together just as Jo as even she can’t remember what happened in the night that changed everything.

Something that I would normally rather see very sceptically is the oftentimes sudden change in location and time. But it just adds to the mystery of the book and it made me want to continue reading as the story sometimes seems unfinished and I desperately wanted to know more.

One other great thing about the book are the characters. Nobody is perfect and in this town, they don’t want to reveal too much and when the reader gets some new information about one person, it mostly leaves a lot more questions open. Almost everyone ‘important’ has a background story and maybe even something to hide. This is also why it was hard for me to predict the things happening next as you could not be sure of anyone’s motives or actions. It also made me change between liking and disliking the characters throughout the book.

The end was maybe somewhat predictable still I could not put the book down for the last third as it captivated me to know exactly how it’s going to end.

I loved the writing and the setting and the characters and I feel like reading more mysteries and thrillers after having had such a good experience.