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by Russell Rowland
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.
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"In straight-ahead, unfussy prose, Rowland keeps the novel humming along. The mystery fizzles a bit in the end, but by then the reader will know that's not where this book's heart is. A quick-moving, plainspoken, mostly charming exploration of the hardscrabble life of the livestock rancher of old." - Kirkus Reviews
"Fans of regional mysteries will find this delightful." - Patricia Ann Owens, Library Journal
"I can't think of an easier pick for a book club than a page-turning murder mystery with multifaceted characters, a profoundly satisfying ending, and plenty to induce a spirited debate...Writing in the tradition of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and McCarthy, Rowland's powerful style fools with its simplicity, and he often turns his eye toward the harsh realities of daily living...Like the land he writes about, this book will leave you humbled, wrestling, and in awe." - Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue and Flicker of Old Dreams
"Cold Country is one of the best books I've read in half a century of very hard living and reading." - Kris Saknussemm, author of Private Midnight and Reverend America
"Cold Country is remarkable in many respects, perhaps chiefly in the way Russell Rowland finds extraordinary drama in ordinary lives." - Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948 and Let Him Go
This information about Cold Country was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Russell Rowland was born in Bozeman, MT in 1957. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. Cold Country is his fifth novel and his seventh book. His first novel, In Open Spaces, was called "a novel of muted elegance" by the New York Times. He lives in Billings, Montana.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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