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CRUEL WINTER
by Anthony Izzo
Pinnacle, September 2005
349 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0786017325


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

It's the 1980s and a group of young friends living in a cold and snow-covered small town find that there's more to dread than the usual perils of growing up. Emma has to fear sexual advances from her cousin Jacob, physically small Paul is regularly beaten by his drunken father, tall and strong Chris is being forced to only be a winning sports jock by his father, and Jack has to fear the constant violent bullies at school while being the leader and protector of his friends.

When they meet the new kid in town, Ronnie Winter, the first thing they have to do is save him from his own big mouth when he teases the school's worst and most violent bully. They soon find that Ronnie has moved, with his widowed mother into the old Steadman mansion, a large and secluded place that has a terrible history.

When Jack meets Ronnie's mother, Cassie, a very young and beautiful woman, she presses him into becoming Ronnie's watcher. Jack can sense something awful from behind her beautiful facade but he decides he likes Ronnie so he takes him on in the group of friends.

Meanwhile in the small town there have been gruesome murders with mutilation involved and detective George Kempf wants his last case before retirement to be solved. But when he crosses Cassie. Winter he finds that she has powers to confuse him. As he investigates on he sees a monster on the Steadman property and knows right away that he's dealing with a killer the likes of which defy logic and sanity.

Writer Anthony Izzo does a fine job in creating likeable and interesting characters in CRUEL WINTER. The small town life, the era and the usual problems in such a society is drawn up well. He also has a fine imagination when creating monsters and fast paced action scenes.

Unfortunately, as good as his set-ups are, the climaxes and culmination of the tensions are wrapped up and dissipated far too quickly and easily. The real life problems are managed unsatisfactorily, and the supernatural aspects of the story are too swiftly agreed upon and vanquished.

There's a lot to enjoy in CRUEL WINTER, but the ending is a fast letdown. This is Izzo's first book and I have high hopes that his writing will mature and his endings will soon be as entertaining as his story's set-up.

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, December 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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