The Big Thaw

Donald Harstad

Aug 2009 · Carl Houseman Book 3 · Sold by Bantam

About this ebook

A killer is placing his cross hairs over the American heartland....

The pair of frozen corpses were found under a tarp in the machine shed of an empty farmhouse. Two males -- brothers -- both killed by bullets from a Russian automatic fired at close range. The cops have a suspect: a man Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman busted five years earlier and the county's lead suspect in a series of recent robberies.

Houseman knows they have the wrong guy. He also knows they've got something bigger than a burglary gone bad ... especially when the FBI starts showing up in Maitland. The brutal double homicide is just the tip of the iceberg in a case where a killer's trail keeps disappearing like footprints in freshly fallen snow, and where one bad break can send a good cop into a deep freeze.

Ratings and reviews

This book has all the investigative punch of a big city procedural, but with a small town feel. I don’t read a lot of procedurals, but this felt pleasantly unique to me. A procedural is naturally methodical, and this systematic way of thinking realistically portrayed the main character’s POV. The book was well-written, well-edited, and well-told. The author did a great job of making the freezing cold become its own character. The main character, Carl Houseman, had a delightful sense of humor. All-in-all, I would recommend this book. At the end of the day, I was eager to get to it and read it and see what happened next. That’s always a good sign!

Easy read, I could hardly put it down!

About the author

Donald Harstad is a twenty-six-year veteran of the Clayton County Sheriff's Department in northeastern Iowa, and the author of the acclaimed novels Eleven Days and Known Dead. A former deputy sheriff, Harstad lives with his wife, Mary, in Elkader, Iowa.