Cold company : an Alaska mystery
(Book)

Originally published: New York : William Morrow, 2002.

Multiple award-winning author Sue Henry once again carries us into the heart of America's last frontier with a gripping tale of suspense set in a land whose rugged, exquisite beauty appeals to the adventurous and strong ... and to those who are drawn to darkness. Cold Company The summer solstice is near -- bringing long sunlit days to the Alaskan wilderness -- and for famed musher Jessie Arnold, the time has come to put the past behind her and move on. Building a new home for herself and her sled dogs on the charred ashes of her old one, she plans to be finished well before the onset of the long northern winter. But her progress is halted -- chilling Jessie to the bone -- when the excavations unearth a skeleton entombed in a crumbling basement wall. Twenty years earlier, a serial killer brutally murdered a number of women in the area. One of the fiend's victims disappeared wearing a butterfly pendant -- a necklace similar, if not identical, to one discoveredwith the grisly human remains. A grim nightmare believed to be long over must now be revisited or, worse still, has been reborn. Because, once again, a local woman has disappeared without a trace. And, once again, Jessie is being pulled into a murder investigation against her will. Red roses are being sent to her anonymously -- the gifts of a secret admirer who may also be a stone-cold killer. In this stark and lonely place, in the first days of the all-too-brief Alaskan summer, the signs suggest the unthinkable: An insatiable human monster has returned ... and Jessie Arnold may well be his next victim. In what is perhaps her most unforgettable novel to date, the incomparable Sue Henry weaves a spellbinding tale of past sins and present-day evils, of humanity at its best and worst, and nature at its most powerful.