a cold day in paradise by steve hamilton

Munch Mancini has cleaned up her act since she showed up for work, stoned and drunk, as the offbeat sleuth in Barbara Seranella's down-and-dirty first novel, ''No Human Involved.'' UNWANTED COMPANY (HarperCollins, $24) finds theįormer biker babe (and odd-job hooker) clean and sober and working as an auto mechanic in Los Angeles. Heat and cold, light and dark - reflects the dramatic, often violent contradictions of people who live on the edge of the world. The way through to your soul,'' Alex is advised, ''you will never feel warm again.'') But Hamilton understands the border mentality, and his tensile prose - with its shifting images of

But her subsequent kidnapping sends him back out into the snowįor a series of brutal encounters with amateur thugs, professional killers, dumb racists and even a few lawmen who don't respect boundaries. When an Ojibwa woman comes to Alex with a face full of bruises (and a bag full of dope) that she got from one of these guys, he offers her asylum in a cabin that he rents out to snowmobilers. Of hockey players whose postgame rituals extend to dealing drugs and beating up Indians. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) to duke it out with a roughneck team In Steve Hamilton's strong debut mystery, ''A Cold Day in Paradise,'' Alex returns in WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON (Thomas Dunne/St. A former Detroit cop and failed private eye who drew first blood Winter of the Wolf Moon by Steve Hamiltonīy MARILYN STASIO n Alex McKnight's rugged neck of the woods - a town called Paradise, right across from Canada, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula - anything underĪ foot of snow is just ''scattered flurries,'' and any fistfight that doesn't require skin grafts qualifies as civilized discourse.

A cold day in paradise by steve hamilton