Iced , by Jenny Siler

            Author Jenny Siler excels in setting and character development, and a beautifully picturesque narrative style, which she applies to fill out a relatively uncomplicated plot.

            The protagonist Meg Gardner has emerged from a dysfunctional family, a start in life on the wrong side of the law, and eighteen months in the slammer. Now she has her first real job, as a GMAC car repossessor in Missoula, Montana.

            When she goes to Clayton Bennett's house to confiscate his Jeep, she finds the authorities there, pulling his body out of the ditch. He had been murdered, and the announced suspects are a Blackfeet Indian named Tina Red Deer and her unknown accomplice. Gardner recalls that her father had once known someone in the Red Deer family on the nearby reservation, but she doesn't recall the name.

            Gardner takes the vehicle she came for and parks it outside her home. She finds a locked briefcase in the vehicle and takes it into the house. An armed robber breaks the Jeep window and then intrudes on her home, seizing the briefcase. A second robber comes for the same item before learning he wasn't the first. She recognizes the robbers as members of a gangster family of immigrants from Ukraine and Belarus, whom she carelessly calls "the Russians."

            Gardner feels that she's already too deep into whatever-it-is to get out of it, so she goes investigating. She begins with a visit to Ivan Popov, who owes her a favor from the old days.

            Iced (2001) is Jenny Siler's second novel. Her first book, Easy Money (1999) featured character Allie Kerry, who earns her income by delivering sealed packages and not asking any questions -- until someone slips a computer disk to her pocket, and she finds herself being pursued by international spies. Siler's debut novel received raves from the media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Now the raves for Iced are starting to be heard.

            If you would enjoy a crime thriller based on multidimensional characters who reach out and force you to keep turning the pages, then you should   get Iced .

          On a cold December day in Missoula, the police pull Clay Bennett's corpse from the weeds. For the cops, Bennett's death is an open-shut-case, the result of a drunken brawl gone out of control. For repo woman Meg Gardner, who'd been looking to snag Bennett's Jeep, his death is an opportunity: Without him around to make life difficult, the job should be a breeze.

          Only one year out of prison, romantically involved, and working the first legitimate job she's ever had, all Meg wants is to keep things clean and simple. Her name still carries the reek of small-town scandal, touched off twenty years ago by the violent implosion of her family. Understandably, she'd like to keep a low profile. A rented house, cigarettes, coffee, beer, burgers, and, in a pinch, her landlady's gun -- that's all she needs to get by, for now.

          So when Bennett's Jeep is broken into outside her house by a bunch of Russian thugs, instinct and experience demand that she walk away. But then she learns about the missing military plane Bennett had been hunting obsessively before he was killed -- the same plane he crashed in the wilderness forty years earlier. And when a tattooed woman with an astonishing facility with knives shows up in town, Meg has no choice but to seek the real cause of Bennett's death.

          Desperate to protect what little she has, and driven by ghosts from her own past, Meg plunges ahead -- finds herself involved in a dangerous web of infidelity, greed, and murder.

About the Author

          Jenny Siler, who was educated at Andover and Columbia, lives in Missoula, Montana. Besides writing she has tended bar, driven a forklift, and graded salmon. Her first novel, Easy Money , was a New York Times Notable book.