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    Hard Cold Winter: A Van Shaw Novel
    Hard Cold Winter: A Van Shaw Novel
    Hard Cold Winter: A Van Shaw Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Hard Cold Winter: A Van Shaw Novel

    Written by Glen Erik Hamilton

    Narrated by R.C. Bray

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Former Army Ranger and thief Van Shaw is thrust into danger as lethal and unpredictable as the war he left behind in this emotionally powerful and gritty follow up to the acclaimed Past Crimes.

    When an old crony of Van Shaw’s late grandfather calls in a favor, the recently-discharged Ranger embarks on a dangerous journey to the Olympic Mountains, in search of a missing girl tied to Van’s own criminal past. What he finds instead is a brutal murder scene, including a victim from one of Seattle’s most influential families.

    But the dead bodies are only the start of Van’s troubles. A fellow Ranger from Afghanistan turns up at Van’s doorstep, seeking support from his former sergeant even as Van wrestles with his own reemerging symptoms of PTSD. The murder investigation leads to heavy pressure, with a billionaire businessman on one side and vicious gangsters on the other, each willing to play dirty to get what they want.

    The price of his survival may be too high, demanding moral compromises that could destroy Van’s relationship with his iron-willed girlfriend, Luce. And when a trusted friend’s betrayal pushes him to the edge, Van has to enlist help from some unexpected places—including someone he believed was lost forever.

    The Ranger will need every ally he can get. A powerful, unseen player is about to unleash a firestorm on Seattle that will burn Van and his people to ashes—and it will take a miracle to stop it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMar 8, 2016
    ISBN9780062445568
    Author

    Glen Erik Hamilton

    A native of Seattle, GLEN ERIK HAMILTON was raised aboard a sailboat and grew up around the marinas and commercial docks and islands of the Pacific Northwest. His novels have won the Anthony, Macavity, and Strand Critics awards, and have been nominated for the Edgar, Barry, and Nero awards. After living for many years in Southern California, he and his family have recently returned to the Emerald City and its beautiful overcast skies.

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    Reviews for Hard Cold Winter

    3.5/5

    26 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      Superb. Every Australian should read it. Especially us whitefellas!
    • 4/5
      This story took me a while to get into, but ended up capturing my interest and attention. I love the complexity of the characters and the situation they find themselves in. Lots to think about!
    • 2/5
      After Hamilton's first in this series, I was looking forward to the second. But, alas, there will be no third. The plot is just too convoluted and about 2/3rds into it, I realized that I just didn't care at all. On the up side, his books take place in Seattle and he's very good at keeping the store geographically placed. It was fun and interesting to know exactly where everyone was. He took two characters to one of my very favorite (and not very well known) restaurants and he described it perfectly. That much I enjoyed a lot and will miss when I pass on the next installments.
    • 5/5
      "For the straight world, crime was a problem or an abstraction, but for people like her, crime was the solution. Not that she called it crime: she called it reparations."

      Grimly funny and vividly captured, Too Much Lip is also violent, hostile, filthy, and generally unpleasant - and Melissa Lucashenko's ability to portray all of these is what makes the novel so good.

      Kerry, a thirtysomething from the city, returns to her family's small town with a backpack of questionably-earned money, bittersweet memories of an ex-girlfriend now behind bars, and outstanding warrants for possession and assaulting police. She's here for the funeral of her grandfather, and finds herself dragged back into the lives of her extended family. And, boy, are they a mess. Her mum's a moderately-functioning alcoholic, her nephew's an anorexic socially-isolated gamer, one of her brothers is navigating the family welfare system as he raises two troubled foster kids while her other brother is, well, a dangerous wreck. Tensions simmer - tension with each other, with their collective history, with the town around them, with their place in the broader country - and there's a constant sense of loss, felt most palpably through Kerry's older sister, missing for almost twenty years. And, on top of all of this, developers in league with the town's possibly corrupt mayor are planning to build on the Aboriginal ancestral lands of Kerry's people.

      I would say things have been better for them, but the reality is they probably haven't been.

      This novel is quintessentially Australian, although it's an Australia with which I have no familiarity. Every page rang true even as I turned away in horror at the idea that anyone could live like this. Lucashenko makes generous use of Australian working-class vernacular ("You chuck the snooze button on then. But I'll be back dreckly to haul ya skinny black mooya over there") as well as Indigenous terms local to her people, creating a vibrant spirit-of-place to which the reader must adapt as they go. She captures the heady mix of emotions that inform Kerry's life: freedom from having rejected much of the (heteronormative, Anglo) culture around her yet daily fear from living on the run and being a black woman in a world that often resents that fact. In lesser hands, this kind of "vernacular novel" can be easily tiring -indeed, for the first 10 pages, I thought it might be the case. This is very much "not my kind of book". And then Lucashenko's prose just took me in its grasp and refused to let go.

      In many ways, Too Much Lip is a novel about violence. The author notes in the afterword that every act of violence in the book has an historical source, most from her own family, and the role of violence in the everyday lives of people - particularly Indigenous people - looms large. It's a truly shocking feeling, only about 15 pages into the novel, when Kerry is reunited with her brother Ken. He's her brother, and he lives with her mum, but she finds herself wondering how much he's had to drink and how honest she can be with him before he would start hitting her. Despite some shocking acts against one another, this family treats them as everyday occurrences. Frustrating, true, but mundane. And Lucashenko lets no-one off lightly. The violence is partly the fault of the individual: characters in the novel squabble over why children who face the same traumas can turn out so different. The violence is partly cultural: their Indigenous heritage is heavily gendered, too keen to let men off the hook for "being men", and too willing to forgive horrific crimes while rejecting those who try to expose such. But, of course, much of the violence is intergenerational and related to colonialism. The oppressive experience that the Salters face of being intensely policed - both literally and figuratively - for acts that would earn white people a reprimand, if that. I can't completely understand this experience, of course, but I imagine it feels like running a race only to realise that everyone else is sprinting ahead while your lane contains potholes, dangerous animals, and the occasional brick wall.

      The remarkable thing, though, is that the book never once feels didactic. Much of what I have mentioned above is only glanced at, or discussed during late-night drinking sessions. Lucashenko doesn't need to preach because the facts of life speak for themselves. And her control over the proceedings is supreme. A clever twist halfway through the novel upends Kerry's view of the world, and the revelations that follow - which should be melodramatic or even a bit ridiculous - feel earnest and natural every step of the way.

      If I were to quibble, one might argue that the good white guy and the bad white guy in the story are both one-dimensional, but I suspect that's part of the point. Lucashenko is turning the tables on the one-dimensional "token" black characters who have populated Australian stories over the past century - and, anyhow, I know a few Buckleys and a few Steves, so perhaps it's not weird after all. Perhaps I would have appreciated a glossary of Indigenous terms. Fair enough, the author is asking us to inhabit her space, and she doesn't - nor should she - feel compelled to write a book on white people's terms. Still, though, while I think white people like myself need to enter a lot more of these spaces on their terms, it wouldn't hurt to open the door a little wider in some circumstances.

      I think any Australian should give this one a go (non-Australians might actually find this impenetrable, being so vernacular-based) and be prepared to leave one's preconceptions at the door. This novel will make you feel angry, perhaps guilty, perhaps personally attacked. But it's worth it.
    • 4/5
      This was such a fast read, and in some ways, it absolutely lived up to the first book in the series, which I adored. In some other ways, I was hoping for more, I admit.Hamilton created such a great character in Van Shaw--he drew me into the first book from page 1, and kept me hooked. Although he was part of what kept me involved with this second installment, though, I guess I wanted more development, and instead he felt pretty unchanged. I don't want to say he was flat, because he felt real and complex, but I guess I wanted to see him more affected, or at least at some point struggling on more than a superficial level. As with the first book, I loved the glimpses back into his past, and when it came to character, those were the best parts of the book. But all that said, the plotting and the storyline were great here, as before, and they kept me engaged. If anything, there might have been one twist too many because it moved so incredibly quickly, but it was an action-packed ride that I couldn't put down, so I really can't complain on this front.All told, there's no doubt that I'll continue with the series, and absolutely recommend it to others.
    • 4/5
      This book by Hamilton is a continuation of stories about Van Shaw. This is my first experience with Van Shaw and I liked what I saw. From a diverse background of the main character the mystery flows from one unforeseen event to another, making you keep reading to find out what is going to happen next. Enjoyed the many characters, and they are characters. Received from Goodreads giveaways and for this book I am happy.J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the Isms" "Wesley's Wars" "To Whom It May Concern" and "Tell Me About the United Methodist Church"