Cold Quiet Country — Clayton Lindemuth

On his last day in power, with a blizzard threatening eighteen inches of snow, Sheriff Bittersmith is called to the scene of a crime. A farmer has been stabbed clean through the neck with a pitchfork. Two sets of tracks lead from the barn, and the dead man's frantic wife exclaims that her daughter is missing. Convinced it was Gale G'Wain, the orphan who worked at the farm, Bittersmith follows the vanishing footprints into the storm. Miles away, holed up in an empty farmhouse, Gale is alone and close to dead after falling through lake ice. Innocent but unlikely to ever stand trial in this corrupt town, he loads his gun and prepares to defend himself against the dead man's sons and the sheriff's department. Set in rural Wyoming in the 1970s and unfolding in a single day, Clayton Lindemuth's debut novel, Cold Quiet Country, explores small-town corruption and the lengths some people will go to exact revenge.