La Froide Vérité

What's a smart, gorgeous, young female cop named Julian Palmer from the NYPD doing up to her nightstick in snow in the upstate New York town of Canaanville? Having a wonderful time, as it turns out. "There was something about that white blanket that captivated her.... It seemed like a way of forgetting. A way of softly covering everything up. Of starting anew," says Jonathan Stone in his impressively tricky first novel. Julian, a cop with a sad secret, has applied for an Advanced Associates Internship, a program designed to drop police officers into totally different environments. She chooses Canaanville for its weather and the chance to work with its legendary police chief, Winston "Bear" Edwards, who has never let a local murder go unsolved for longer than two weeks.

But Julian arrives a month after the brutal stabbing death of a 21-year-old waitress, and Edwards is still seriously stumped. (He's also miffed that Julian turns out to be a woman in spite of her name, but he quickly gets over that.) The crotchety Edwards even agrees to let a psychic named Wayne Hill sniff around the case, and the exceedingly strange but ultimately sympathetic Hill actually comes up with a couple of clues. But Jonathan Stone has more on his mind than debunking or defending psychics. He has set himself a daredevil challenge--walking a tightrope over yawning chasms of possible disbelief and disaster with the skill of a master. The Cold Truth is the kind of book that keeps making you say, "Oh, no--he's not going to try that!" Then he tries it, pulls it off, and goes on to make you say it again. --Dick Adler