Title: The Girls in The Snow
Author(s) Name(s): Stacy Green
Published in: October, 2020
Why You Might Like This Book: Read this book if you enjoy
- justice-seeking themes,
- cold cases,
- murder mystery,
- unsolved cases,
- female protagonists,
- suspenseful plots,
- criminal profiling,
- family drama,
- revenge-based themes, and
- serial killer stories.
Who Should Avoid This Book: Avoid this book if you are triggered by or dislike
- serial killer plots,
- wrongful imprisonment,
- murder,
- date rape,
- sexual violence and sexual assault,
- domestic violence,
- depression, anxiety, and trauma,
- kidnapping,
- suicide, or
- grief and loss.
Special Agent Nicole “Nikki” Hunt returns to her hometown Stillwater, Minnesota for the first time in twenty years. The last time she was here was when she discovered her parents’ dead bodies in their home one night and she was the primary witness in the case. She had seen Mark Todd that night and following her testimony, Mark was arrested and spent the rest of his time in jail. Everyone in this remote town knows her name and they all see her as the girl who found her parents murdered. Nikki decided to leave this place, put the past behind her, and developed her career as a special agent working with the FBI, specializing in serial killers. She chose to not just leave the town but change her appearance and try to get herself as far away from her family’s murder case as possible so that she could start a new life. She started her career in this field chasing Frost Killer, a serial killer who, like almost all other serial killers, followed a pattern. He would choose a female victim during the fall, tried to keep the victim alive for as long as he could, then their body would be found in the snow, with a red ribbon on their back, dumped in places that are active, like in front of schools, where the bodies could be easily spotted. He also cleans the entire body of the victim with bleach, so that no evidence can be traced. Winter was his favourite time because Nikki was sure that he enjoyed the public attention his latest murder would get him. Frost is also the only serial killer she’s chased so far whom she has not yet caught.
This time Nikki was invited to visit a crime scene in Stillwater, where the local police had found the dead bodies of the missing best friends Madison and Kaylee, dumped in the snow. Since Nikki is the expert in the serial killer Frost cases, she was informed, but this case has a lot of differences compared to how Frost usually behaves: there is no red ribbon, the victims are younger than his youngest so far, and he kills only one at a time, but this time, there are two victims. The first responder Sergeant Miller also states that he has this hunch that the killer in this case must be a local because of how far away, in a remote cornfield, the bodies were found. They are joined by Nikki’s teammates Courtney, the crime scene analyst she has been working with from the day she joined the team and Liam, a skilled, slim, and tall agent she has been working with for the past year.
As Nikki tries to come to terms with everything, she sees that young activists belonging to the “Innocence Project” are fighting to prove that Mark is innocent, demanding that DNA tests be done, and that he must be released. At the Sheriff’s department, she meets Harvey Hardin, who is none other than the deputy whom she met years before, on the night when her parents were murdered, who helped her through the trial process. After exchanging pleasantries and small talk, she learns from Hardin and Miller all the information they have gathered on the two best friends Madison and Kaylee. Madison was the golden kid and Kayless was a problem child; the former had many friends and the latter was mostly a loner, who also got detentions before they went missing. They went missing six weeks ago, that Madison had last texted a friend Miles Hanson that they both will show up but they never met that friend, Madison’s phone had been switched off and never turned on again, and the puzzling piece that Kaylee did not have a phone because her mother had taken it away from her to punish her for hanging out with some wrong people. Nikki inisists that a teenager can’t not have a phone for three weeks when they have a part-time job, so there must be a cheap, secret phone Kaylee must have had.
Miles Hanson, Kaylee’s mother’s (Jessica’s) boyfriend Ricky Fillinger and Kaylee’s mom have alibis for that day. Madison’s mom Amy Banks was out of town that day to visit her mother, Madison’s step-father had a business meeting, and her biological father was in a hospital getting treated for kidney stones. Nikki holds that these murders must be the work of someone who knew the girls, not Frost, but proposes that they tell the press that they will consider the possible role of Frost just so that the real killer does not get anxious that his cover may soon be blown. As she agrees to work on the case, when the time comes for Miller to meet Madison’s stepdad, she has a surprise: the stepdad of Madison is John Banks, Nikki’s first boyfriend and lover before she left the state for good. Also, Sergeant Miller is her school junior, Kenny Miller; it’s a really small world in Stillwater!
When she meets Madison’s parents, particularly John, too many memories from the past come flooding, and as aggressive as Amy might seem to be, both Nikki and Miller notice that there might be problems in their marriage, given the way they behave. When she interviews Jessica personally, she learns that there is a possibility that her daughter Kaley could have made a secret deal with her on-and-off boyfriend, who is now a drug dealer. Miles’ father also happens to be Kaley’s English teacher, and both the father and the son seem to be hiding something, probably the dad was not there at home on the day the girls went missing, like he told the police, and the son was forced to lie.
Taking up the case would mean letting herself be surrounded by ghosts from her past, all that she’s been trying to forget, and running away from the case, back to St Paul would be against her conscience, two young girls were murdered, so she decides to stay and proceed with the investigation no matter what, no matter how much it secretly hurts and haunts her. Her six-year-old daughter Lacey is the only person who makes her feel happy and relaxed. Tyler, her ex-husband, with whom she had had an amicable divorce is still a supportive, loving partner. She has the support of Liam, Court, and Miller, but when she encounters Rory Todd, the younger brother of Mark Todd unexpectedly and he tells her that she does not know the full truth and that no tox test results were availble in the court documents, Nikki freezes. Rory informs her that she is wrong and Mark will hopefully be released, and the news of new biological evidence in her parents’ case is covered by all news and media outlets. She saw Mark with blood on his hands, his fingerprints were all over the gun, and she certainly remembers them taking her blood samples to show that she, the witness, was not drunk when she saw her parents’ dead bodies, so what is going on? Now, Nikki finds herself entangled in more cases than she signed up for.
The Girls in the Snow is an unevenly paced novel, which starts with a promising, interesting plot, but the typical reader might notice lots of logical inconsistencies and even grammatical mistakes and the use of wrong names in several places in the ebook version. Frequently, the reader is distracted from the thriller plot, as a vast portion of the book feels like lamenting about the protagonist’s past and negative emotions, which is also repetitive. At some point, the weight of the thriller side of the story significantly reduces and it starts feeling like a personal melodrama. The Girls in the Snow is a good example of what happens when you combine a good baseline plot with average writing and poor editing. There is hardly any depth and it just feels like a long narrative, with too many characters, more drama and less thriller. The protagonist deals with at least a dozen feelings like grief, fear, anxiety, trauma, anger, sadness, love for her daughter, liking her ex husband, trust issues, lust or attraction for another man, gratitude for her friends, pretending to have it all together, and so on, and these emotions are all over the book, flooding almost every chapter, so it is as if the main murder cases happened in a different book you read two months ago! At best, this is an average thriller novel, which could have been better with better writing and editing, less focus on personal feelings, and greater focus on the mystery and plot twists. Only towarsd the end does the story pick up some pace, finally, so I would give this a 2.75-star rating.
