A shadowy Detroit real estate billionaire. A ruthless fixer. A successful Mexicantown family business in their crosshairs. Gentrification has never been bloodier.Authentico Foods Inc. has been a part of Detroit’s Mexicantown for over thirty years, grown from a home kitchen business to a city block–long facility that supplies Mexican tortillas to restaurants throughout the Midwest. Detroit ex-cop … Midwest.
Detroit ex-cop and Mexicantown native August Snow has been invited for a business meeting at Authentico Foods. Its owner, Ronaldo Ochoa, is dying, and is being blackmailed into selling the company to an anonymous entity. Worried about his employees, Ochoa wants August to buy it. August has no interest in running a tortilla empire, but he does want to know who’s threatening his neighborhood. Quickly, his investigation takes a devastating turn and he and his loved ones find themselves ensnared in a dangerous net of ruthless billionaire developers. August Snow must fight not only for his life, but for the soul of Mexicantown itself.
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In Dead of Winter, Detroit ex-cop and Mexicantown native August Snow fights not only for his own life, but for the soul of the neighborhood he loves. When Snow is invited for a business meeting at Authentico Foods, he finds that the owner is being blackmailed into selling out by an anonymous developer. Snow doesn’t want to run a tortilla factory (the reason for the meeting), but he does want to find out who’s threatening his neighborhood. It’s a thriller with strong elements of a whodunnit (and why). Old friends, flames and enemies converge with violent, genuinely inspired and deadly results.
This third book featuring August Snow raises the tension—and the stakes—on Jones’s major themes of redemption, forgiveness and belonging. Snow carries scars from his time with the military in Afghanistan and can’t forgive himself for something that happened there; the Detroit police department where he used to work can’t forgive him for crossing the thin blue line. He finds joy in the everyday details of his neighborhood and its people. And its food. The sense of place, of history and of belonging is vivid and runs deeply in the August Snow series. That sense of place, of belonging, adds to the stakes if Snow fails to find out who or what is behind this latest threat.
An action-packed thriller, Dead of Winter delivers high-stakes drama with twists and surprises (one of which you will never see coming!); and a solid, compelling hero for these confusing times.
Readers who enjoy a cracking mystery-thriller, with surprising (and alarming!) twists will love Dead of Winter. Readers of the Jack Reacher novels will be rewarded, too, with action, tension and intrigue. But where Reacher carries his ethics from place to place, August Snow deals justice in his own hometown.
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” is the well-known quote from the epicure and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. And author Stephen Mack Jones wastes no time letting us know exactly who and what August Snow is, even as those behind the blackmail and murder remain in shadow. Though the novel’s keeps a furious page-turning pace, there’s time to eat. Food in August Snow’s world is a vital ingredient. Its function in the story is almost like another character in the drama. Its creation, its consumption—and what it means—wafts through these pages like “a warm and seductively spicy aroma.”
The other characters are compelling and seductively spicy in their own way. His on-again-off-again love Tatina, his confessor and friend Father Grabowski, his godmother and godfather are all compelling and fully realized. Their dialogue crackles with terse interchanges that brim with snark and subtext. It’s hard to say which character intrigued me the most, and all I can say without giving too much away is that the assassin is someone I’d like to know more about.
An action-packed thriller, Dead of Winter delivers high-stakes drama with twists and surprises (one of which you will never see coming!); and a solid, compelling hero for these confusing times…A tale, I might add, with enough meat on its bones to be thoroughly satisfying.
The first line of “Dead of Winter” says it all. “My house is quietly becoming Frankenstein’s monster.”
August Octavio Snow is a true Detroit native; he loves Motown music and is obsessed with cars, big US made muscle cars. (He strongly objects to making an exit in what? A Prius?) He is a marine, once and always, having been in Afghanistan, a.k.a., “the sand,” and at least for a minute, was a cop. He won a $12 million wrongful dismissal suit against the Detroit Police Department, but struggles with the dark pressures of life.
The story unfolds in Snow’s first-person narrative filled with both philosophy and humor. (He readily answers the doorbell, confident that he will not be mugged, beaten or eaten, since thieves, killers and zombies rarely use the doorbell.) Conversations reflect both the troubling and the hilariously inappropriate things that people say to each other. The vocabulary and cadence of the narrative set the tone of the story more than the events themselves; the strength of the story is in the telling.
Snow and his friends flip houses in the southwest Detroit neighborhood of Mexicantown. Rampant development is threatening local businesses as the neighborhood evolves into a hipster, urban-chic place to be. Mr. Ochoa, the owner of local landmark Authentico Foods, has already had a big cash offer. He wants Snow to buy everything both to keep it out of the hands of a big developer, and to allow him a life somewhere that is not a “frozen wasteland three-quarters of the year.” Of course nothing is simple, and what evolves is a detailed and difficult journey. Snow is accustomed to guns, knives, and revenge, however problematic personal issues must be resolved, and the past is waiting for revenge.
“Remind me again who the good guys are and who the bad guys are?”
Snow is on a long and violent journey, but he shows personal growth, changes his attitude, and makes a commitment to himself and others.
I received a review copy of “Dead of Winter” from Stephen Mack Jones and Soho Crime. “Dead of Winter” is book three in the “August Snow” series, but it is not necessary to have read the previous books. Everything a new reader needs to know is included in this narrative. However, once finished, new readers will certainly want to go back to read the two previous books.