The Cold Nowhere

Starred review from February 3, 2014
At the start of Thriller Award–winner Freeman’s masterfully plotted sixth novel featuring Duluth, Minn., police detective Jonathan Stride (after 2010’s The Burying Place), a half-frozen 16-year-old hooker turns up in Stride’s cottage on Lake Superior late one winter night. Catalina “Cat” Mateo needs Stride to protect her from a stalker, but the detective carries some psychological baggage: 10 years earlier, he failed to save Cat’s mother from being butchered by her brutal husband, who then shot himself as little Cat cowered under their porch. Maggie Bei, Stride’s longtime police partner and onetime lover, warns him that Cat could now be unstable, even homicidal, but Stride, a strong man whose weakness is rescuing women, can’t abandon the teenager. Freeman shows how those endless North Shore winters have toughened and aged Stride, closing him off from the world, but the author also convincingly makes Stride break out of his icy, self-imposed shell. Author tour. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents.

March 1, 2014
Back off, Nordic noir. For sheer wintry relentlessness and icebound desolation, the various Scandinavian settings now fashionable in thrillers cannot compete with the decaying shipping and mining city of Duluth, Minnesota. And this small city, whose crumbling mansions and factories converted to shops are an architectural reminder of an earlier era, is the perfect place for a thriller about the stranglehold the past exerts on the present. Series hero Jonathan Stride, a Duluth police lieutenant, carries a barge-load of guilt from 10 years ago, when he failed to stop an abusive husband from murdering Stride's friend. The past comes dripping into his home when the 16-year-old surviving daughter, now a runaway and a prostitute, arrives nearly dead from exposure after jumping off a ship in the harbor. The girl claims that a man is stalking her, trying to kill her. The narrative moves between the point of view of Stride and that of the girl's pursuer, making this well-plotted, atmospheric thriller feel like a high-stakes chess game. Freeman's Spilled Blood won Best Hardcover Novel of 2013 at the International Thriller Awards.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)