The Frost Trilogy

Peter Robertson

Description

The Frost Trilogy brings together Peter Robertson's novels Permafrost, Mission, and Colorblind, which follow the amateur sleuthing of Tom Frost, a semi-retired businessman caught up in the cases of missing persons in northern Michigan, Boulder, Colo., and New Orleans, respectively.

In Permafrost, Tom is a wealthy Chicago businessman with too much time on his hands, a man who “displayed impeccable manners and looked earnestly concerned when he had to”; one who “had taken no chances.” Keith is close to homeless and adrift somewhere in northern Michigan. They were friends once, two decades ago, in a working-class Scottish town brought vividly to life in a series of evocative flashbacks. Now the hunt to find one brings life-affirming purpose to the other. An intuition of impending danger proves to be frighteningly accurate as a small lakeside town grudgingly reveals its dark underbelly, in this debut crime novel that Booklist calls taut . . . captivating . . . skillfully written, and . . . deeply satisfying.

In Mission, a decade and a half after finding death and deceit in Northern Michigan, Tom has divorced and relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and has given up the reins of his lucrative business interests to his long-suffering employee, Nye Prior, for a life of craft beer and biking. He isn't necessarily any richer or happier, but he is certainly older and fitter. On an early morning ride, Tom sees a young man pulled from the flooded Boulder Creek. The death isn't very unusual; in fact another man had drowned in the creek just a few weeks ago. The Boulder cops have certainly seen it before but Tom hasn't and his instincts kick in with a vengeance. He is soon riding the creek paths with a whole new purpose: to find the killer before the next deadly spring flood arrives.

Robertson returns to the life of Tom, the Scottish expat he introduced in his fine debut. . . . A successful follow-up to a strong opening act.—Booklist

Colorblind, the trilogy finale, looks at the city of New Orleans through the eyes of a seasoned tourist and explores music both as a means of salvation and a road to obsession. An impulsive act of theft coincides with an inexplicable death in the suburbs of Chicago. A long drive south to Louisiana follows the trail of an obscure folk singer who had drowned years ago in trusted waters. Before all the connections between the two deaths can be revealed, a series of hunches will lead Tom to dark and depressing truths about the nature of fandom and the fallibility of instincts. In the hunt for answers, Tom rediscovers his own love of music, his suppressed vulnerability, and the realization that this time around not all his hunches are good ones.

Colorblind delivers a mystery that's even darker than [Tom] had imagined, and confirms “Tom's appeal [is] his tantalizing ambiguity”—Booklist

Artful, realistic, and poignant in just the right places.—Windy City Reviews

Informations

• Publié par: Gibson House Press
• Date de parution: 04 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948721158
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE FROST TRILOGY
PETER ROBERTSON



G IBSON H OUSE P RESS
Flossmoor, Illinois
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2012, 2013, 2016 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-948721-15-8 (ebundle)


CONTENTS
Permafrost Mission Colorblind







PERMAFROST
A MYSTERY
Peter Robertson



ALSO BY PETER ROBERTSON
Mission
Colorblind


GIBSON HOUSE PRESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2012 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-2-9 (ePub)
Cover design: Christian Fuenfhausen


DEDICATION
for my family


ONE
I sat in my car and read about Keith Pringle in a Chicago newspaper article. His name shimmered above the page, like heat above asphalt, and I shivered, with what was the only premonition I had ever had in my life.
He was already dead, my premonition told me.
* * *
It was a warm and hazy summer morning, already close to eighty degrees with matching humidity, and not yet seven, by the digital clock on the sleek wood dashboard of a black Mercedes SL600 convertible, or the thin gold Raymond Weil wristwatch beneath the lightly starched white cuff of the cotton oxford shirt I had bought one lunchtime on an impulse from Neiman Marcus.
The cellular phone was silent. The roof of the car was down in an attempt to capture the best part of the day. In the trunk the CD-changer located the fourth disc in sequence, and Rickie Lee Jones sang “Rebel Rebel,” by David Bowie, a song from my youth, with which I would have liked to identify.
What had the day promised before I read the newspaper? I can no longer remember. I am wealthy, I suppose I should mention, by any conventional standards. I am white and male and European-born and not yet old, and all I possess has come remarkably easily, without stress or undue compromise, and is therefore largely worthless, to my selfish eyes.
A large white car, perhaps a late-model Chevrolet, the kind of car favored by older male drivers in passable off-the-rack suits, had abandoned the road and stood, still hissing in some annoyance, on the parched and ill-tended grass on the shoulder. The car was empty and a bright red tow truck blocked two lanes of traffic in an effort to get at it.
Horns naturally honked, and the heat, and the promise of still more heat, made the good people angry and impatient. I just sat and waited and after a while unfolded my newspaper and skipped impatiently past the front page to the meatier sections inside.
I had no pressing engagements, and I don’t have a boss with a scowling eye fixed permanently on a time clock or an evaluation slip.
I do find that people often mistake my complacency for contentment.
The article in question concerned the numerous hazards befalling European tourists in large American cities. I scrolled down through the fatal signs, the easy-to-identify rental cars and the shoddy maps, the dark streets on the wrong side of town. It appeared that virtually every state had at least one harrowing tale to tell.
Near the bottom of the page, Michigan’s roll call of death was the smallest. Yes, an official agreed, they had their tourists, and yes, one was possibly missing. He was a British man, a Mr. Keith Pringle, who had been vacationing in the northern part of the state, where the population was sparse, but where tourism was quietly encouraged. Mr. Pringle was believed to be visiting a close relative, the article stated, but he was now also believed to be missing for close to two months. I noted that everything was only believed at this early stage. The British Consulate was naturally concerned, if essentially noncommittal, but the skilled woman journalist was able to hint darkly that this was indeed another hapless innocent, fallen to a rampant new crime wave.
The title of the article was “Innocents Abroad.”
* * *
Keith’s name came at me from the page like a freak wave from a still sea, because he and I had been friends as teenagers. No, the term friends is perhaps too presumptive, and too intimate. We had known of each other, and we had met occasionally.
But he was preserved in a piece of memory I keep, and tend, if seldom access, from a hometown I have never managed to bring into any kind of emotional focus, but which is a memory, or catalog of memories, that, at times, resonates with more intensity than the present day.
* * *
Now I was far from home. As was Keith Pringle. He was believed to be missing, whereas my position in the world is well documented.
I fed my premonition. It remained intact and had even blossomed some. I now knew for certain that Keith lay dead only six hours from me, from my expensive car, and my listless and shiny life.
But the six hours translated into thousands of miles, and almost twenty years distance, and a gently growing alienation, from the small and timid place where we had both started out.
But the distance wasn’t that important, because I was going to find him.


TWO
It was hard to spot where one city ended and the other began, but somewhere in the crisscrossing suburban transition, the small Scottish town where Keith Pringle and I lived struggled to exist.
I grew up there, through my youth and the sullen years after my father, who I barely knew, died. Later, I still languished there, deep in an uncertain eternity of high school, handicapped by shyness and the chronic fear of physical contact with either sex, for whatever reason.
I lived there until I went to college at eighteen and blossomed into a demon lover and rugged sportsman who, in truth, existed only in my lurid imagination.
Our town had one bank and four pubs, it had council houses that looked in essence as pretty and as cared for as anything bought and paid for, or at least cheerfully brokered by the ever-willing building societies.
A betting shop owned by a minor sporting hero of a few years past was the older male’s social focus in a high street that was a little too narrow for two lanes of traffic, while the co-op claimed the bulk of the elderly female allegiance. The four pubs duked it out for the loyalties of the rest of the adults.
* * *
The town school was too small for the town children, so that some were farmed out to zealously progressive comprehensives in the two cities, and the rest were housed and educated in prefab huts intended for temporary use, but which were still standing and functional four years ago, when my wife and I took a more or less pointless emotional detour on a rare trip home to visit my mother.
* * *
It was one of my few whimsical moments. It was one of my wife’s few indulgences.
I remember stopping the car, getting out, expecting the warm jolt, some pleasing form of spiritual connection, the headlong thrust into reminiscence and reverie. But the huts all looked just as they had. There was no halo of nostalgia. They were just prefab huts.Old. And quite ugly.
My wife has less soul than I, I suspect, and was clearly uninterested, pausing politely, a slightly pained look on her smooth, sculptured face, reminding me that my mother was expecting us for dinner, and that she dealt badly with even a marginal disruption to her routine.
I got back into the rented car and we drove away slowly, moving like a lost tourist between the parked cars on the high street, which had never been widened, and never would now, because of the new bypass that catapulted the commuter traffic from city to city, without pausing to acknowledge our little town as it squatted, sulking, in the shadows of the concrete that stretched heavenward.
At a zebra crossing a lady guard with a huge orange lollipop of a sign took three children across the street quickly. One was crying. Two were laughing. An old man in a cloth cap and a Harris tweed jacket shiny at the elbows left the betting shop smiling like a fiend, and with a flourish entered the public bar door of the closest pub. Ill-gotten gains. He clearly felt flush, and would soon feel all the flusher.
Once the children had crossed, and left the sanctuary of the guard’s domain, the crying one lashed out at one of the others and produced tears on a smudged cheek with his little hard fist. Now two cried, and the smiling boy was left out.
Why are children so relentlessly, callously horrible? Is it simply safety in numbers?
When I was fifteen I met Keith Pringle at a bad and otherwise uneventful party, where he chased after stupid, undeserving love, and got his nose bloodied for his trouble.
I don’t now recall the name of the person who gave the party. It’s very possible I never knew it. Doubtless a friend of a friend of a friend. Or else word of the event spread, and beer-fuelled teenage radar picked up the signal. You know how it is.
But I do recall the music, and the dark living room stripped of furniture by wise parents, the smell of cigarettes and spilt beer on carpets, and Brut aftershave applied a little too liberally.
Three delirious boys swayed like waves in the ocean in the center of the room, their arms spread across each other’s shoulders like a Russian folk dance, drinking their warm beer from cans that never emptied.
They were loud, and they were drunk, or else they were pretending to be.
The song was “Jet” by Paul McCartney & Wings, and the year was perhaps 1974. I wore a navy brushed denim jacket and gray loon pants with a flare that fully covered my scuffed suede shoes, and I wore a leather thong around my