Cold Country
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Montana, 1968: The small town of Paradise Valley is ripped open when popular rancher and notorious bachelor Tom Butcher is found murdered one morning, beaten to death by a baseball bat. Suspicion among the tight-knit community immediately falls on the outsider, Carl Logan, who recently moved in with his family and his troubled son Roger. What Carl doesn't realize is that there are plenty of people in Paradise Valley who have reason to kill Tom Butcher.
Complications arise when the investigating officers discover that Tom Butcher had a secret—a secret he kept even from Junior Kirby, a lifelong rancher and Butcher’s best friend. As accusations fly and secrets are revealed one after another, the people of Paradise Valley learn how deeply Tom Butcher was embedded in their lives, and that they may not have known him at all.
With familiar mastery, Russell Rowland, the author of In Open Spaces and Fifty-Six Counties, returns to rural Montana to explore a small town torn apart by secrets and suspicions, and how the tenuous bonds of friendship struggle to hold against the differences that would sever us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1968, this evocative novel from Rowland (In Open Spaces) explores the fallout from the beating murder of gadfly rancher Tom Butcher, who was beloved by some and loathed by other residents of Paradise Valley, Mont. Though any number of townsfolk could be suspects in Tom's murder, the locals are quick to lay blame on newcomer Carl Logan, who was hired to manage wealthy Peter Kenwood's ranch, snatching the position from a jealous longtime employee. A former school teacher, Carl has long dreamed of owning a ranch and uprooted his wife and three children from an unspecified locale to take the job in Paradise Valley. Meanwhile, Carl's headstrong 10-year-old son, Roger, sparks controversy as the boy stands up to a school bully and brings greater scrutiny on the Logan family. The murder mystery propels the story, but Rowland's clear-eyed look at mid-20th-century rural life provides a satisfying portrait of the frayed bonds within a community whose members must sometimes depend on people who repel them.
