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Jenny Siler Iced
St. Martin's Paperbacks 2001 0312979525 / 9780312979522 Mass Market Paperback Very Good
0312979525 0312979525 Amazon Review In Meg Gardner, who's trying to put her life together after a string of small-time crimes and an 18-month stretch in prison, Jenny Siler has created another edgy, unsentimental heroine whose murky relationship with her father informs this gritty thriller just as it did for Allie Kerry, the protagonist of Easy Money, Siler's heralded debut novel. And Iced, set in the brilliant freezing glare of Montana in winter, is a worthy follow-up. Meg's working her first legitimate job in years as a repo woman. Told to pick up former air force pilot Clay Bennett's Jeep, she's not exactly grief- stricken when she hears that Bennett's been killed in some kind of drunken exchange with a young Indian woman--it will make her job a lot easier. There's something familiar about the woman, Tina Red Deer, but until Bennett's Jeep is stolen from outside Meg's house and her life is threatened over a briefcase that was in his car, she doesn't make the connection between Bennett's supposed killer and her father's long-ago affair with a Native American woman that led him to abandon Meg and her mother. Even then, the connections are slow in coming. Meg has her hands full just trying to stay alive once it's clear that Bennett's briefcase seems to be missing some maps that a couple of very dangerous people will do anything to get--including kill the only man she's loved and trusted since her father deserted her. The plot is less clear-cut than it might be, and Meg's connection with Tina Red Deer, while psychologically interesting, isn't successful from a novelistic point of view. Meg herself remains the center of the mystery; one senses that only a few of her many dimensions have been explored here, owing to the limitations of the plot. But there are flashes of sheer brilliance in the narrative and wonderful metaphorical descriptions of an unforgiving landscape: Growing up, I loved the fire season, the perpetual dusk that hung over the valley, the extraterrestrial sunsets ... some afternoons, when lightning storms raked across the mountains, dozens of small fires smoldered in the thick cover of the evergreens. If I think of my life in terms of combustion, it's this kind of lightning fire that comes to mind. Not a flash immolation but a slow kindling, a red ember smoking for hours, even days, until it explodes in the dry underbrush and the forest bursts into fiery tongues. Though I can't pinpoint the instant when my life ignited, there are important moments I go back to again and again. Like the day almost 20 years ago when my mother shot my father. Iced is a strong successor to an auspicious debut, one that will leave the reader longing for Siler's next. --Jane Adams --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Publishers Weekly Having established herself as one of the new talents in tough gal crime fiction with last year's Easy Money, Siler stays with the form in her latest, though she introduces a new lead character and locale. Her protagonist is Meg Gardner, a hard-living, whiskey-drinking repo woman from Missoula, Mont., just out of prison for stabbing her boyfriend. Gardner isn't looking for trouble, but when she stumbles onto a crime scene in the middle of a routine repossession, she finds herself mixed up in a sticky investigation into the death of local travel agent Clayton Bennett. On the back seat of the dead man's SUV is a briefcase containing a bunch of maps of the remote mountains north of town. Before Gardner can return the car to the repo company, two tough individualsDa Russian mobster and a brute of a womanDdrop by for a visit, demanding the briefcase. Gardner gives it to the Russian, then starts poking around into Bennett's private life. She learns of a mysterious incident nearly 50 years earlier in which Bennett, at the time an Air Force reserve pilot, crash-landed a plane high in the Bitterroots range. Given up for dead, he reemerged two months later, babbling incoherently. Ever since, Bennett has been trying to locate the crash site. Gardner, and now several others, want to know why. Though it l
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