To Jess, Michigan in January is cold and dull: almost as dull as her job teaching home economics to unruly teen girls at the high school; almost as dull as her life, she muses, while staring out her frosted window at frozen Blackwater Bay. Suddenly Jess spies an old ice fisherman running wildly to shore after a day on the bay. At first she thinks he's drunk, which wouldn't be unusual. Then she learns the hideous truth: the old man has just discovered a fish-nibbled corpse floating up into an icehole. With this, the third gruesome death in recent years, the quaint resort town is becoming notorious for homicide. Its sheriff, Matt Gabriel, never thought he'd specialize in murder, but he's already added new deputies and even uses a helicopter. Now he fears that an unidentified body floating under the ice might just be sensational enough to turn the town into a media circus. And he's right, especially after the corpse is found to have a bullet hole in its head, and the victim is identified as an ex-con with mob connections. Even as Matt ponders the case, mystery strikes again as one of Jess's students vanishes in the midst of a brutal blizzard. Did Chrissie run away? Has she been kidnapped? Is she alive?
To Jess, Michigan in January is cold and dull: almost as dull as her job teaching home economics to unruly teen girls at the high school; almost as dull as her life, she muses, while staring out her frosted window at frozen Blackwater Bay. Suddenly Jess spies an old ice fisherman running wildly to shore after a day on the bay. At first she thinks he's drunk, which wouldn't be unusual. Then she learns the hideous truth: the old man has just discovered a fish-nibbled corpse floating up into an icehole. With this, the third gruesome death in recent years, the quaint resort town is becoming notorious for homicide. Its sheriff, Matt Gabriel, never thought he'd specialize in murder, but he's already added new deputies and even uses a helicopter. Now he fears that an unidentified body floating under the ice might just be sensational enough to turn the town into a media circus. And he's right, especially after the corpse is found to have a bullet hole in its head, and the victim is identified as an ex-con with mob connections. Even as Matt ponders the case, mystery strikes again as one of Jess's students vanishes in the midst of a brutal blizzard. Did Chrissie run away? Has she been kidnapped? Is she alive?