Books: Winter’s Gifts By Ben Aaronovitch (2023)

“When retired FBI Agent Patrick Henderson calls in an ‘X-Ray Sierra India’ incident, the operator doesn’t understand. He tells them to pass it up the chain till someone does. That person is FBI Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds. Leaving Quantico for snowbound Northern Wisconsin, she finds that a tornado has flattened half the town – and there’s no sign of Henderson. Things soon go from weird to worse, as neighbors report unsettling sightings, key evidence goes missing, and the snow keeps rising – cutting off the town, with no way in or out. Something terrible is awakening. As the clues lead to the coldest of cold cases – a cursed expedition into the frozen wilderness – Reynolds follows a trail from the start of the American nightmare, to the horror that still lives on today.”

Winter’s Gifts is another delightful novella linked to, but not central to, Ben Aaronovitch’s fun urban fantasy novels, the UK based Rivers of London series. Kimberley, as side character in other books, comes forward here in a well-paced, but not really deep tale about Native Spirits of Wisconsin and ill-conceived 1844 Marsh Expedition.  I like her, but at some point a British writer trying to write about an American women in the United States –and in Wisconsin to boot-, you get a bit distracted by some Aaronvitch’s failed attempts –deliberate or not- to sound like he knows what he’s writing about. But American writers make British characters all stereotypes, so why not a British author doing light urban fantasy? Like all winter coats are called parkas, everyone has guns and pulls them on visitors; coffee is brewed on a kettle on the burner, uses the word flashlight (instead of torches), but uses tyres instead of tires, frostbite into frostnip, and headlights into headlamps. There are other examples, but you get the point.

Still, nothing feels too off. I grew up in northwestern suburbs of Chicago, and my paternal Great Aunt lived in Waupaca, Wisconsin (where my uncle now lives), so Aaronvitch gets the basic aspects of the state correct. It’s also another avenue in the Rivers of London books to explore, which opens the series, as any series ages, it can become stale. He’ll do that again later in the year when The Masquerades of Spring novella is released and is set in New York at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th Century.