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Here in the San Francisco office of KnowBetter.com, we don't see a whole lot of snow. However, we realize that many of you out there are spending your mornings shoveling sidewalks, scraping ice off of windshields and wishing that your car heater would start working a heckuva lot faster. We highly recommend that you avoid going outside into the cold, and stay in bed with a warm blanket and one of these cold weather-themed titles. Best of all, you won't have to scrape any ice off of your screen. |
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A Winter Haunting
Dan Simmons, Perfectbound
A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage--and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation. But moving into a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of town--the one-time residence of a strange and brilliant friend who lost his young life in a grisly "accident" back in the terrible summer of 1960--is only the latest in his long succession of recent mistakes. Because Dale is not alone here. He has been followed to this house of shadows by private demons who are now twisting his reality into horrifying new forms. And a thick, blanketing early snow is starting to fall ...
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Angel In The Snow
Glen Ebisch, The Fiction Works
The new kid at North Hill Academy cannot believe he is idolized as the next Sherlock Holmes by his roommate, until he heroically rescues a girl from a motorcycle gang. His confidence is a bit shaken, though, when he finds a student lying on her back in the snow--dead!
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Cat Tales: The Window To Summer
Leta Nolan Childers, DiskUs Publishing
Tired of winter and snow, the three intrepid cats--Baby, Buddy and Bug--go in search of the "Window to Summer."
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Dark Winter Riders
Stephen Tennant, Silver Lake Publishing
As winter envelops the Vale of Markgard, the dark forms of the outlaw Vengalen and his band ride through the hills, and the murderous mercenary Brand walks the halls of Prince Vestein's Keep. Fate has proclaimed that these two old enemies shall meet again. However, a sinister plot exists between the Emperor and the Atua, and the Allfather has plans of his own. As events unfold, Vengalen and Brand find they must put aside their differences and join forces to save a young girl with a very special destiny.
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Hearth To Heart: Tales Of Winter Love And Magic
Jac Eddins and Marissa St. James, PageTurner Ebooks
A heart-warming collection of stories for the Winter season. If it's cold outside, drop in by the hearth for a group of stories sure to inspire warm feelings, romance, and maybe a chuckle or two. A young woman finds "The Hat" in a second hand shop and something unusual happens. Can the old felt hat be a clue to the past? A little English boy is scarred by an unexpected event one Christmas. Will the next year bring understanding with "The Bright Star"? "Polly Schneeburger, aged Eight and a Quarter" is a little girl who's too smart for her own good and wants the lead in the school play. "The Two Santas"--Now there could be a bit of confusion; wonder what the end result will be. Returning to one's roots can bring the best of days and memories. Adella is a young lady getting over the loss of her mother, but that doesn't mean she can't discover the "Gift of Love," and the source is a dream come true. Can you imagine Emily's disappointment when she learns she'll be spending the winter alone? Maybe "Snow Angels" will have a hand in that.
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Ice!
Tristan Jones, e-reads
Retiring on a pension after being torpedoed in WWII, Tristan Jones embarks on a test of endurance that will last over two years, nearly killing him more than once. Attempting to sail farther North than anyone ever has, he embarks from Iceland on the Cresswell in the summer of 1959. His only companion? A three-legged, one-eyed Labrador named Nelson. He spends his first winter holed up near an Eskimo village in a Greenland fjord. After a violent snowstorm and without an adequate supply of food, he spends a full week digging himself out of enormous snow drifts until he is able to be seen and rescued. This incident kicks off a series of impossible adventures as he voyages to the treacherous waters of the North Pole. His second winter at sea finds him trapped in an enormous ice pack in the Arctic Ocean. For 366 days he is marooned on the craft. As he faces his loneliness and the possibility of his own death under the dazzling Northern lights, Tristan Jones's incomparable sailing adventure reaches an unimaginable climax.
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Icy Hot
B.J. McCall, Ellora's Cave
Lord Chancellor Aaxis Thrane wants peace, an end to the war raging between his home planet of Sark and the ice world of Glacid, and he's willing to risk something far more difficult than a full-scale attack. He kidnaps Tayra, the Princess of Glacid, not to hold her for ransom, but to impregnate her and force peace through a political marriage. He knows Tayra is entering her annual fertile cycle, the blessed time when she is at her sexual zenith. After months away from home and his harem, Aaxis is ready for a new kind of war. Knowing conception is impossible without orgasm, Aaxis must convince his enemy to accept both his plan and his seed...
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Lord Of Snow And Shadows
Sarah Ash, Random House/Spectra
Gavril Andar knows nothing of his father--or the ominous legacy that awaits him. But his innocence is about to be shattered. The man who ruled the wintry kingdom of Azhkendir, a man infused with the burning blood of the dragon-warrior known as Drakhaoul, has been murdered by his enemies. It is his fiery, chameleonlike blood that pulses through Gavril's veins. The news is Gavril's first taste of death--but it will not be his last. For blood is the liquid that seals his fate. Expected by clan warriors from the north to avenge his father's murder--and still his unquiet ghost--Gavril is kidnapped. He soon learns that becoming Drakhaon means not only ascending to the throne of Azhkendir but changing, in subtle ways at first, into a being of extraordinary power and might. A being that must be replenished with the blood of innocentsin order to survive. Ensconced in Kastel Drakhaon with no means of escape from the icebound kingdom, and carefully watched by neighboring rulers waiting to move against him, the untested Gavril must fight to retain his human heart and soul in the face of impending war--and the dark instincts that threaten to overpower him.
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Murphy's Law
Rebecca Sinclair, Hard Shell Word Factory
Murphy's Law reigns supreme ... what else can explain how Murphy McKenna managed to get herself stuck in an unexpected, early-in-the-season Maine blizzard? In a very remote cabin. With dead phones. And impassable roads. Could there be a worse time for a desperate, badly wounded man to show up on her doorstep? Instinct demands Murphy not trust Garrett Thayer. After all, the man refuses to give her a straight answer about anything. Even her precious Himalayan cat, Moonshine, is suspicious. Who wouldn't be? Not only is Garrett hurt, he's also apparently been out wandering in the storm with nothing more than a duffel bag stuffed with money, antique jewelry (a bottle of antihistamines?)--and a gun. Will Murphy's conscience allow her to turn her back on the handsome stranger who may be a thief, a bank robber, or worse...?
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The Cruise Of The Corwin: Muir's Final Great Journey
John Muir, The Narrative Press
The renowned naturalist John Muir married in 1880, but the lure of one last grand adventure proved too great. In the spring of 1881 he sailed for the Arctic aboard the Corwin, whose sad task it was to search for the Jeannette, lost during a polar expedition. Muir had already written about the effects of glaciation, and welcomed the chance to get a first hand view of Alaskan glaciers farther north than he had ever been. In its attempt to find the Jeannette, the Corwin travelled along the coast of Alaska and then Siberia. They visited native villages as well as the uninhabited Wrangell Island, which they claimed for America in 1881. Muir considered himself one of the first humans to have set foot upon it. The Cruise of the Corwin, pulled together from Muir's articles and journals by his literary executor, is a welcome addition to the literature about America's last frontier, Alaska. Muir captures the fierce beauty of the land and its inhabitants when a way of life was fast vanishing--and thanks to his efforts, some of it is still preserved for this generation.
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The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage Of The Karluk
Jennifer Niven, Time Warner/Hyperion
The riveting story of the 1913 expedition of twenty-five people who sailed out of British Columbia in search of an undiscovered Arctic continent. But tragedy struck in January 1914 when an ice cap tore a hole in the vessel's hull, shipwrecking all on board. The castaways abandoned ship and suffered from battle starvation, snow blindness, exposure to the brutal winter, and each other. The Ice Master is an epic tale of true adventure that rivals the most dramatic fiction. Drawing on the diaries of those who were rescued and those who perished, and even an interview with the one living survivor,
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The Serpent In The Snow
Kevin Callis, Double Dragon Publishing
"Do not fear me. Fear what lives within me." In 1839, Kevin Eston makes a pact with an evil spirit in order to save his life. He is also granted conditional immortality--any person who takes his life will in turn be slain by the bloodthirsty demon that he harbors. For nearly two centuries after pledging his soul, he has wandered the land, avoiding human contact as much as possible, for fear of the consequences of interaction. In late 2001 he returns to Sagawaukee, a small Minnesota town that stands where an Indian nation of the same name once existed. A century ago he found amidst the Sagawaukee people the greatest peace he had ever known, but now, in modern times, only ongoing strife awaits him. Before Kevin even enters the town proper, he is involved in an altercation which leads to murder, and from that point onwards, bloodshed begets more bloodshed...
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The White Death: Tragedy And Heroism In An Avalanche Zone
McKay Jenkins, Random House
The day after Christmas 1969, five robust young men set out to climb the imposing north face of Mount Cleveland in Glacier National Park. One of the highest vertical walls in the United States, the face had never before been scaled--and certainly not in winter, when it was bound with ice. But the mountain was to become a memorial for the boys. After they failed to return to their families, an aerial search found the boys' tracks dead-ending at the jagged edge of a colossal avalanche. A massive search effort turned up little until the spring thaw, when searchers recovered a camera, dragged a half mile down the mountain. Its film, miraculously intact, eventually pointed the way to the boys' bodies, suspended upside down in a cave of snow and ice. In The White Death, McKay Jenkins unfolds a gripping natural history of avalanches, framed by the story of one of the worst avalanche disasters in mountaineering history. Ranking among the most destructive natural phenomena on earth, ava-lanches have shaped human endeavors from the beginning of recorded history. In 218 b.c., Hannibal lost more than eighteen thousand men, two thousand horses, and several elephants in deadly slides in the Italian Alps. During the First World War, combatants launched explosives onto the slopes above enemy troops, triggering slides that killed more effectively than firepower--and, paradoxically, pioneered the technology now used to tame avalanches on ski slopes all over the world. Yet our lifesaving skills remain almost as crude and limited as they were centuries ago: the rescuer's best tool is still a long, thin pole used for probing the packed snow for its victims. The White Death merges a fascinating natural history with a cautionary tale of the damage our sense of invincibility can do in the face of awesome natural power. Like Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, The White Death chronicles an American tragedy of lives cut short. And just as Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm re-creates the sensation of drowning, this unforgettable book provides the disturbing details of every climber's worst nightmare: being buried alive in a torrent of snow and ice.
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Whiteout
Vicki Delany, LTDBooks
Sick of the rat race and high-pressure politics of a large computer company, tormented by memories of an emotionally disturbed teenage daughter, Joanna Hastings flees to a falling-down old cabin in the remote woods of Northern Ontario. She is delighted with her move, as the tiny town of Hope River seems to provide her with the solitude she craves and the peace she needs. But all too soon the world invades her seclusion, when murder strikes at the heart of the little community and a neighbor's troubled teenaged granddaughter stands accused. Then the sounds begin. As the harsh winter storms close in Joanna discovers that not even death can end the troubles of a lost teenager.
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Winter Range
Claire Davis, St. Martin's Press
Ike Parsons is the sheriff of a small Montana town, with a reputation for fairness, common sense, and kindness. When he hears that Chas Stubblefield has fallen on hard times in the bitter winter, he heads out to the rancher's spread to offer assistance. What Ike finds shocks him to his core: cattle starving in the snow or freezing where they stand, and a brooding Stubblefield near bankruptcy, living off the meat of his dying herd. His attempt to help backfires, and Ike is troubled to learn that Chas is planning revenge, a plot that will target Ike's wife Pattiann--a woman with a past in which Chas Stubblefield figured intimately.
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