ICED

For Megan, home is a place to come back to when there's nowhere left to go. Her last home was a cosy cell at a woman's prison in New Mexico - she'd stabbed a man, though most would say he'd deserved it. She gets a job repossessing cars whose owners have defaulted on their payments. When local pilot Clayton Bennett is stabbed to death, a Native American couple he'd got drunk with take the rap. His Cherokee Jeep was due for repo and Megan grabs it, but the moment she gets her hands on the vehicle the spiral of violence that began with Bennett's murder escalates. A gang of criminally minded Russian immigrants and a woman with a red dragon tattoo, apparently working alone, seem to have a pressing interest in the Jeep. Or in something that's hidden inside it - and nothing and no one will stop them finding it. Jenny Siler has done it again with an intensely vivid piece of writing. Megan's voice draws the reader immediately to a dark, soulful world of appealing loners, sad misfits, and extremely nasty villains. Freezing, bleak Montana in the dead of winter is bought frigidly to life in her wonderful, evocative prose, and Megan's questing character, dark past and rich inner life make her a mesmerising companion. Unputdownable.