Danny Bedford is a man-child, an outcast in the quiet
rural
town of Wyalusing, Pennsylvania. He is a gentle giant
living there with very few friends and no family. While
ice
skating when he was eight, he fell through the ice and
remained
under water until rescue reached him over ten minutes
later.
It caused brain damage. His parents both drowned trying
to save him. Danny is slow but kind and sweet. Mindy
Knolls, forty, a waitress at the Friedenshutten
Restaurant,
has always been nice to him since their childhood. She
sticks up for Danny when the mean spirited, bully Deputy
Mike Sokowski, who she has had an on-again, off- again
relationship, ridicules Danny.
Mr. and Mrs. Bedford, Owners of the laundromat let Danny
take care of their business in exchange for a small room
over the shop and fifty dollars "walking around money".
Danny does a
good job. He is also very good at wood carving small
animals. His detail is perfect. He is finishing a robin
he
made for Mindy for her birthday. Later that night he heads
to her rundown trailer on the outskirts of town to present
her with his newspaper wrapped gift. He finds Cindy dead,
laying in a pool of blood. At the scene is Deputy Sokowski
and his sidekick, Carl. They set up Danny for the
horrific
murder they committed.
Deputy Mike Sokowski is rotton to the core, a bully, an
alcoholic and deals in weed. He has tormented Danny
since
childhood, with help from his ignorant
partner in crime, Carl. He uses Mindy for sex and when
she
refuses to participate, Sokowski brutually murders her
while ordering
Carl to hold her down. Sokowski believes the town
people will believe him when he tells them that Danny
committed the crime.
DEEP WINTER is a fast paced thriller told from multiple
points of
view. The manhunt to catch Danny through frozen forests,
set off more killings. It is a wild chase and very
graphic, becoming completely out of control. Lester, the
aging sheriff is slow to figure out the real killer , but
has his doubts that it is Danny, as well as most of the
towns people.
Rooting for Danny, the pages flew bringing a smashing
finale to a great and very exciting debut read by Samuel
W.
Gailey. I eagerly await your next book.
In the small town of Wyalusing in eastern Pennsylvania, a
woman is found brutally murdered one winter night. Next to
the body is Danny Bedford, a misunderstood man who suffered
a tragic brain injury that left him with limited mental
capabilities. Despite his simple life, his intimidating size
has caused his neighbors to ostracize him out of fear of
what he may do. So when the local bully-turned-deputy
discovers Danny with the body, it’s obvious that Danny’s
physical strength has finally become deadly. But in the
long, freezing night that follows, the murder is only the
first in a series of crimes that viciously upset the town
order—an unstoppable chain of violence that appears to make
Danny’s guilt undeniable.
With the threat of an approaching blizzard, the local
sheriff and a state trooper work through the predawn hours
to restore some semblance of order to Wyalusing. As they
investigate one unspeakable incident after another, they
discover an intricate web of lies revealing that not
everything is quite what it seems.
With echoes of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and Tana French’s
In the Woods, Samuel W. Gailey’s Deep Winter is a richly
atmospheric and ingeniously plotted debut, surprising to the
final page. It’s impossible to escape this bone-chilling
story of deception, where the truth is uncertain and
something sinister lurks just below the surface. . . .