“Even the dead tell stories,” begins Sedgwick’s slim yet taut and complex thriller about a family barely surviving in 1910 along the Swedish-Finnish border, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Sig pieces together the story his father, Einar Andersson, is trying to tell after he discovers his frozen body on a slowly thawing lake, a risk his father would never take, and a one-thumbed, vengeful man named Gunther Wolff arrives, demanding the gold he claims he was cheated out of by Sig’s father. Alternating chapters between Sig and his older sister’s struggle with Wolff and their life ten years ago in the mining town of Nome, when their father was an assayist testing the purity of gold during a rush in the Alaska Territory, untangle Einar’s clues. Always looming in Sig’s past and present is his father’s Colt revolver and the moral dilemma: “To pull the trigger, or not to pull the trigger?” Is violence ever necessary? A chilling, atmospheric story that will haunt readers with its descriptions of a desolate terrain and Sig’s difficult decisions. (author’s note) (Thriller. YA)
