ICED UNDER

Iced Under

Nadine Doolittle

Canadian rights: McArthur & Company

All other rights available

Shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award.

Raw from a painful divorce, with daughters Darcy and Brittany in tow, Sara Wolesley leaves Toronto to assume possession of a cottage on Hennessy Lake in the village of St. Jude in West Quebec. A strange, bitterly cold winter with very little snow has caused the lake to freeze to clear black ice.

Her new life is not the idyll Sara imagined it would be. Daily battles with frozen plumbing, isolation and money pressures break her down. When her ex-husband threatens to take custody of their children, Sara tries to get a job housecleaning for Giller Hennessy, a reclusive man haunted by tragedy. Turned down for the job, Sara returns home to find the plumbing in the cottage frozen. She grabs an axe and marches to the lake planning to put a hole in the ice for water but slips. Sprawled on the ice under a building snowstorm, she spies a small hand in the reeds below. The reeds part revealing the body of a little girl trapped under the ice. Seven year old Oralee Pelletier has been missing since August.

The horrifying discovery entangles Sara in a dangerous alliance with Nicky Pelletier, the mother of the child and Charlene Tate, a vivacious single mother and former friend of Nicky's. At the same time, she convinces Giller Hennessy to hire her and fights a growing attraction to the quiet woodworker. He reveals that the girl could not have drowned where she was found, and also proves to have a dark secret of his own.

Set in a claustrophobic small community battling a harsh Quebecan winter with a murder in its midst, Iced Under explores the relationships between women, between parents and children and between men and women.

Nadine Doolittle was born in Comox, British Columbia in 1960 to an RCAF mechanic and a Scottish housewife. She graduated with a degree in Theatre Arts from Vancouver Community College’s prestigious Studio 58 program and launched into a career in acting. After ten years in theatre, and with the birth of her first child, she switched careers to become a casting associate at Alliance Productions in Toronto. A move to rural Wakefield, Quebec coincided with another career change to writing, first as an award-winning reporter with the Low Down to Hull and Back News in the Gatineau Hills, and later as a columnist for the Ottawa Metro News covering transit issues in the nation’s capital. During this time she wrote her first novel, Iced Under, published in 2008 and shortlisted for Canada’s major crime fiction award, the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel, in 2009.  Nadine now makes her home on 22 forested acres in Alcove, Quebec where she writes novels full time.