The author of The Wind Chill Factor tells a story within a story upon a story of some serial murders taking place in Minnesota through the eyes of writer Paul Cavanaugh who proves to be a soft mark for the ne plus attractive Kim Blankenship, after her husband dies by his own hand. That's just for starters. Kim seems to have left a long line of question marks and erasures in her tracks: what happened to a man called Dierker, more than ten years before, or the scrapbook of photographs of a small group of in-and-outdoorsmen who shared a lodge and one woman in the woods? Of course blood will tell, particularly bad blood, and this is a long history of mixed if not indeterminate paternity, incest, and what have you not. But it's all laminated with an easy narrative confidence well past its more restricted possibilities for blind conjecture or belief. A long, smooth con.