Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 May 02 • Friday

I picked up William T. Hallahan's The Dead of Winter at the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Book Fair, expecting a Death Wish-type novel.

It’s actually a complicated and suspenseful mystery thriller. When Vincent Reese is brutally beaten in his apartment and dies of a heart attack in the hospital, the three guys he plays poker with every week vow to get revenge.

And then they do that, right away. Find the guy who did it and kill him. This happens really early on in the book so it’s only a mild spoiler.

Our three protagonists are an interesting trio. Basche is a big game hunter who’s always been curious about the most dangerous game. Tyler is a philosophy professor who has trouble controlling his emotions. And then there’s Lyons, a white collar guy who’s surprisingly adept with lockpicks and rifles. Who also takes the lead on deduction and investigation. Who’s good at cryptanalysis. Who wakes up one day in his apartment, which is locked from the inside, violently ill with a hypodermic mark in his arm and no memory of how it got there…

Hallahan stacks mystery upon mystery. Killing Reese’s killer leads them to the man who commissioned the murder. And that man leads to another. Why was their friend, remarkable only for his phenomenal memory, assaulted and his apartment painstakingly ransacked? Why does… oh wait never mind. That’s enough.

The Dead of Winter is really well written. Never flashy but always atmospheric, adroit and economical. It’s a great New York City book too, dropping the reader into less traveled outer-borough areas and taking advantage of the December setting to show the city as a damp, snowy, windy and dangerous place.

The pacing is perfect and Hallahan sustains various mysterious elements for an incredibly long time without ever trying this reader’s patience. I’ll definitely look out for his other books.

The first line is “He woke up”.