In an ice-bound river, a professor's wife has drowned, and the unruffled surface of campus life at Atherton University is becoming agitated. Randall has had an affair with the professor, and revelations are pending in the local press. Rumours grow, and people in the town make connections with a similar death many years earlier, and the deception that binds the three friends together threatens to destroy them utterly.

It would be foolish to deny that the plot does not have strong echoes of Donna Tartt's much-acclaimed The Secret History, but Christopher Rice is very much his own man and such allusions are only momentarily distracting. Perhaps the gothic elements (so skilfully handled here) should not be too much of a surprise, as the author's mother is no less than Anne Rice, doyenne of the epic vampire novel. And as this contemporary horror story moves ineluctably to its chilling conclusion, Anne Rice may not be pleased by the fact that her son's book is considerably more impressive than anything she herself has done in some time. And the pulse-racing set-pieces here will no doubt soon be inspiring a bidding war in Hollywood. --Barry Forshaw

Synopsis
From the author of A DENSITY OF SOULS comes an electrifying new novel of murder and menace set on a snowy university campus. When a professor's wife is found drowned in an icy river, rumours of murder are rife within the walls of Atherton University. But then an older mystery emerges from the shadows as people recall the discovery of a corpse in a frozen creek some twenty years earlier and wonder whether the two might possibly be connected. Three friends find themselves snared in a web of lies surrounding the murders: for each of them college had promised a bright future and a way to disconnect from a dark, haunted past, but - as winter sets in - their secret histories threaten to reveal themselves in nightmarish fashion. Snowbound on the university campus, Kathryn, Randall and Jesse are the unwitting captives of a malevolent force that drives them relentlessly toward the 'snow garden' of the title - a place of horrors that is all too real...and all too near. Christopher Rice has written an unforgettable and powerful thriller that probes the terrible weight of the past on the present and the frighteningly corrosive nature of secrets. A novel not to be missed...