Review
"An enthralling cat and mouse adventure." - FHM on Cold 'Smolens creates a marvellous atmosphere' - Sunday Telegraph on Cold 'A mesmerising danse macabre' - The Sunday Express on Cold 'COLD is a finely crafted, wild yarn set in the great north. John Smolens gives us a suspenseful tale in a style somewhere between Jack London and Raymond Chandler. A fine read' - Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall on Cold
Samuel Adams has grown from an unhappy boy into an unhappy man. He has memories of a fractured childhood: a sad and troubled mother, a hauntingly destructive sister and a father who stepped in and out of the family's lives with ever-diminishing frequency. He carries his emotions in an invisible world, a world where he stores his greatest sorrows and his deepest fears. Each new pain is quietly stored away amidst the anger, adding to the tragedy of his burden. Samuel functions in life but can't participate, his movements but a slow rehearsal for another life entirely. Unsure of a direction he becomes increasingly obsessed with the father he has rarely seen, fitting together hazy images from his childhood of a distant, elusive, uncaring figure. It is with the death of his mother that the final blow is dealt. With her illness, Samuel's mother becomes less guarded, as if she needs to share some dark secret. His father is seen briefly entering the hospital room on the day of her death: is he trying to prevent her from revealing the truth? Samuel is suspicious. But his suspicions grow to outrage when he tries to collect his mother's ashes only to discover that they are with his father. He is taking them home, he tells the attendant. Samuel is furious. His mother's home is with him in Boston. What right has a man who has neglected his family all of his life to take his mother away? He didn't share his life with her and he has no right to her in death. Driven to action, Samuel hunts for his father in a bid to reclaim his mother's ashes. What he discovers is a shadowy underworld of violence and deception, greed and conspiracies, and a brief glimpse into the life his father has lived and never dared share. A fantastic blend of fiction and fact, this original and captivating psychological thriller makes excellent reading. (Kirkus UK)
A son wars with his father over his dead mother's ashes in an edgy, Oedipal thriller. Names aside, these Adams men, John and Sam (father and son), give off zero patriotic resonance. For one thing, John is, by trade, an assassin. Actually, he may be the assassin, since evidence exists placing him in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, rifle in hand, the day JFK was shot. In one scenario, he's there as part of a secret service contingent protecting the president, but son Sam doesn't buy that for a minute. To the contrary, he's written a book-One True Assassin-persuasively putting the case for dad as triggerman. That, however, isn't really Sam's major gripe against his father. Apparently, he could have lived with the idea of John the presidential assassin. It's John the family deserter, the father who never was, that keeps resentment on the boil. As the story opens, long-suffering Mrs. Adams, hospitalized, is about to breathe her last, Sam keeping a vigil at her side. From some mysterious corner of the world, John materializes in time to be there at the end and then outrace Sam to the crematorium. Mind you, Sam has minimal desire for the purloined ashes, but now that his father seems to value them, Sam's desperate to get them back, which means that suddenly there's a motley list of determined John-hunters: furtive figures from his checkered past who mean him harm; two journalists who want to write books about him; a ruthless ex-senator who wants to make political capital of him. And the bitterly angry son who never knew whether to love or hate him. Crafted by a writer who's good at atmospherics (Cold, 2001, etc.). But individual scenes that are striking don't quite do it when a pivotal character-the father, in this case-is so ambiguous that his motives are impenetrable. (Kirkus Reviews)
Boston Sunday Globe
'A first rate political thriller'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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