Night of the Ice Storm

By David Stout

The night of the ice storm in tiny Bessemer, New York, is memorable for more than just the savage weather. That same frigid January evening, a young Catholic priest, Father John Barrow, is brutally bludgeoned to death by an unknown assailant. Two decades later the case remains unsolved, and a group of former employees of the local newspaper hold a reunion and listen to a tape recording made at an earlier celebration when the storm and the terrible crime were the talk of the day. But something police beat reporter Ed Speri hears on the recording compels him to take a closer look at the now ice-cold trail – a decision that ultimately leads to tragedy.

Suddenly the stakes have gotten much too high to ignore for Marlee West, the reporter who originally made the damning tape, and her colleague Jenniferurley Hurley. The darkness that fell over their small town on that awful winter night two decades earlier has never truly lifted. A murderer still walks among them, ready to kill and to kill again, and is closer than anyone could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: mysteriouspress.com
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781784979362

David Stout

David Stout (b. 1942) is an accomplished reporter who has been writing mysteries and true crime since the 1980s. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, Stout took a job at the New York Times in 1982. He spent nearly twenty-eight years at the newspaper, as a reporter, editor, and rewrite man covering national news and sports, and retired in 2009. Stout began writing his first novel while working at the Times. Based on the true story of a 1940s double-murder for which fourteen-year-old George Stinney was controversially executed, Carolina Skeletons (1988) won Stout an Edgar Award for best first novel. After two more well-received mysteries, Night of the Ice Storm (1991) and The Dog Hermit (1993), Stout turned to writing nonfiction. Night of the Devil (2003) tells the story of famous convict Thomas Trantino, while The Boy in the Box (2008) is an investigation of one of America’s most famous unsolved murders. Since retiring from the Times, Stout has redoubled his work on his next book.