It's A Kind Of Zen Question: If

It's Always Sad If Anybody You Know Has A Personal Problem.

I Wanted Readers To Be Genuinely Unsure As To Whether She's Telling The Truth Or Lying. It Meant Making Her Partly Sympathetic, And Partly Unsympathetic, Which Wasn't Easy.

Intensely Vivid Characters, Terrible Crimes, And A Brutal Deep-frozen Landscape All Prove Beyond A Reasonable Doubt That Cold Nurtures Good And Evil As Readily As Heat ... And That Giles Blunt Is A Really Tremendous Crime Novelist.

He Looked At The Pain And He Set Himself Apart From It. He Saw It, Examined It, Identified It, Corralled It. He Isolated It. He Challenged It. You Against Me? Dream On, Pal. He Built Borders For It. Then Walls. He Built Walls And Forced The Pain Behind Them And Then He Moved The Walls Inward, Compressing The Pain, Crushing It, Boxing It In, Limiting It, Beating It.

The Third Guy Was Different. He Was What You Got When You Ate Squirrels For Four Generations. Smarter Than A Rat And Tougher Than A Goat, And Jumpier Than Either One.