Winter and Night
by S. J. Rozan
Summary
The call comes to Bill Smith at two in the morning, from an NYPD lockup: a fifteen year old picked up for helping street kids roll a drunk has given the cops one name, his uncle's. The boy is Gary Russell, son of the sister Bill has not spoken to in years, and before Bill can get answers Gary slips away again, leaving his uncle two facts: the kid crossed the river from Warrenstown, New Jersey, and whatever drove him out of that town scared him more than Manhattan at night.
Warrenstown, when Bill and his partner Lydia Chin go in after him, is the book's real subject: a town that is a football program with a municipality attached, where the boosters own the calendar, the players own the school, and the annual pre season jamboree approaches like a holy day. A high school girl is found dead after her own party and nobody wants to ask which football players were there; another teenager the players torment disappears too; and the adults, coaches, cops, parents, Bill's own sister, close ranks with the practiced smoothness of people who have amortised other people's damage for decades. Rozan runs the missing boy hunt at thriller pace while excavating Bill Smith's own buried history, a harsh childhood and an estranged family, the series' longest held secrets paying out here, and the climax, at the jamboree with a storm coming in, converts the town's whole mythology into the crime scene it always was.
Around three hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the private eye novel aimed at American sports worship, and the book where a great series' quietest partner finally opens his files.
Historical Context & Significance
Winter and Night won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2003, the summit of S. J. Rozan's Lydia Chin and Bill Smith series, whose structural gimmick, alternating narrators book by book between a young Chinese American investigator and her older white partner, had been quietly revolutionary through the nineties: two communities, two voices, one partnership, the bi cultural private eye novel built into the series' architecture.
Rozan, a working architect for years before writing full time, gave the Smith books their engineering, and this entry's football town, put the series' machinery to social examination; the Edgar arrived with the Macavity and Nero in the same season's sweep.
She later served on Mystery Writers of America's national board, took the Private Eye Writers of America presidency, and kept the Japanese market's particular devotion, the series continuing past a dozen volumes; Warrenstown remains its best known book.