• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

New to the RCMP's Major Crimes Unit, Corporal Roxanne Calloway is keen to make her mark. She's young and ambitious. But when she's called from the big city to tiny Cullen Village to lead the investigation into the death of the talented but devious star of the local music scene—discovered frozen and dismembered at the local dump—she finds much to contend with. The close-knit community does not give up its secrets willingly. Barely has she begun her investigation when another very dead, very frozen body disturbs the rural peace.

In the summer Cullen Village is filled with cottagers and day-trippers who flock to the lakeshore's tranquil beaches. But when the temperatures drop the tourists disappear and the year-round residents settle in for months of bitter cold. The local book club likes to cozy up with good food and good friends—and, of course, good books.

But not this winter.

As the wind bowls and the snow deepens, the book club—and the village—are riven by suspicion and rumour. Can there be a serial killer in their midst? As tensions mount, Corporal Calloway scrambles to make sense of an ever more perplexing set of clues—before someone kills again.

Raye Anderson was born on the East Coast of Scotland and studied Drama in Edinburgh. She has iived in the Scottish Borders and also on the Hebridean Isle of Tiree. In Canada, her adoptive home, Raye has worked as a playwright, drama teacher, arts educator and theatre school director, primarily at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg but also in Ottawa and Calgary. She also taught at the University of Manitoba. Raye now lives with two dogs in the beautiful Manitoba Interlake. She draws, paints and writes crime fiction. Drama and visual art animate her stories. She likes to create action driven narratives and uses words to conjure up pictures of the landscape around her, the scene of The Dead of Winter, her first novel and the first of a series featuring Roxanne Calloway of the RCMP. Raye has two daughters and a granddaughter who has inherited her grandmother’s love of Drama.

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