Severed Heads Can Be Cozy Too: "Dead Of Winter" By Darcy Coates

Enthralling, thrilling, and delightfully terrifying, Darcy Coate’s Dead of Winter aggressively grasps readers and plummets them into a tense story reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s 'And Then There Were None'. This newest novel from the talented Darcy Coates was published in July of 2023 and tells the story of eleven strangers stranded in an abandoned cabin. Unfortunately, the weather and starvation aren’t the only things they have to worry about. A killer is on the loose in this isolated wilderness. No one can be trusted.

Our main character, Christa, is looking to end the war with her dark past. She has been dating Kiernan - a golden retriever of a man - for six months, and she is hopeful that they will return from their snowy vacation as fiancés. Having grown up in these mountains, Kiernan expresses his excitement to show Christa the landscape of his childhood. Their romantic fresh start takes a turn for the worst when the pair is lost in a blizzard. They are separated, and only Christa reaches the safety of the small cabin inhabited by her fellow tourists from the bus. Exhausted and plagued with frostbite, she collapses in the cabin only to wake and find that Kiernan is still missing in the blizzard. As the blizzard continues to howl and the odds of Kiernan surviving dwindle, the group sleeps in the cramped cabin. They are awoken to a knocking on the cabin window. In hopes of finding Kiernan or a rescue team, the tour group is shocked to find that a branch had been knocking on the window and attached to that branch is the severed head of their tour guide.

Stranded in the vast, unreachable wilderness, the tourists have no way to contact the outside world, and suspicion is cast from person to person. This story quickly becomes a gory 'Who-done-it' that keeps the reader guessing until the last page.

Coates artfully creates a tense atmosphere that demands you take seriously the life-threatening situation our characters are in. The descriptions of the unrelenting blizzard, low visibility, darkness, and close living quarters not only give the reader an accurate picture of what the characters are experiencing but also make the reader feel the pain and struggles of the characters.

The reader is seeing the mystery unfold through Christa’s eyes. Aside from Christa, all of the characters appear to be accurate stereotypes of a variety of personalities, reminding the reader that anyone is capable of evil. Coates utilizes the situation to its full potential when creating this mystery. They do not have the power to charge their phones, no service, it is too risky to travel in the blizzard, they have trouble keeping track of time, lack of weapons, lack of wilderness preparedness, and no tour guide. Creating a recipe for disaster with a killer on the loose, causing panic and fear in the characters as well as the readers.

Coates presents the reader with several theories and has Christa work them out in her head to help the reader draw their own conclusions. The longer the characters were stranded, the more they let their true personalities show and the more complicated the mystery became.

While I had my theory that turned out to be true, I was still not confident in my guess until it was finally revealed. I truly had no clue what directions the story was going to take, and I was obsessed with finding out. I went to bed thinking about this book and woke up thinking about this book. It was the perfect wintery escape for this holiday season. Honestly, this would make an amazing gift for Christmas. It is such a quick read; your loved one would have no trouble reading this over the Holiday. My toxic trait is that if snow is involved, I will consider it a cozy book even if severed heads are involved.

I look forward to reading much more by Coates in the very near future.

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