Bitterfrost:
Book 1
River Deep
Book 2
Bryan Gruley
Severn House Publisher
Bitterfrost and River Deep blends crime fiction, a mystery, and legal thriller all wrapped up in a biting midwestern noir atmosphere. The small town has secrets that run deep and cold and ice hockey serves as a central focus of the community.
The plot of Bitterfrost begins with Jimmy Baker on his kitchen floor with his hands and clothes covered in blood and no memory of the night before. He soon learns that witnesses and forensic evidence have linked him to a double murder that took place in the hours he can’t remember.
“I came up with the idea for Bitterfrost from two different real-world stories. This guy named Bertuzzi played forward years ago in the NHL. And he got in a fight with a guy named Stephen Moore. He inflicted injuries so grave that Moore never played again. I’m a hockey player, so I was familiar with this story and wondered a lot about it, and eventually I started thinking, how do you cope with the possibility that you’ve ruined somebody’s life? Some bad choice was made, and somebody suffers because of it. To address that question, if not answer it, I invented Jimmy. Baker.”
“The other real-world event that influenced this story took place in Mio Michigan, in the 80s, these two guys were driving up to go hunting, supposedly, and they got hammered. And they ended up hassling some barmaid there. They ran into the wrong people, and they were never seen again, with their bodies never found. Eventually three brothers, who lived in that area, are now in prison, but it took 17 or 18 years to solve the case. It’s documented in a really good book called Darker Than Night by Tom Henderson. I put those two real-life events together for Bitterfrost.”
The plot has his past comes back to haunt him. A former hockey star, Jimmy Baker quit the game after almost killing an opponent. Now he is the Zamboni driver for the amateur team in his hometown of Bitterfrost, Michigan, living in penance.Given his violent reputation, he is accused of murdering two men that were at the same bar as himself. Needing legal representation, Jimmy calls on his old friend Devyn Payne, a defense attorney, who persuades her wealthy mother, Eleanor, to post $250,000 for Jimmy’s bail.
“In the first book, he’s kind of a lonely guy, and then he gets accused of murder, and he’s in a lot of trouble. And he doesn’t even know exactly what happened in that instance, but he knows he’s capable of extreme violence, because he did the same thing to a player. For him, every day is a penance. He’s trying to make up for what he did. After having one drink he went home but cannot understand why he has all this blood on his hands.”
River Deep has Defense Attorney Devyn Payne switching sides, now working for the prosecution team. Her first case is prosecuting a mother accused of drowning her twin sons. An SUV is submerged in the Jako River, appearing to have left the icy road and gone into the water. In the car were Catriona Dulaney, her husband Sammy Hardt, and their eight-month-old twin sons. Catriona and Sammy survive, but their sons do not.
“For River Deep, it’s a little simpler. In 1989, a guy named Larry Delisle, drove his wife, and their four young children, into the Detroit River. The kids all drowned but Delisle and his wife survived. The cops and other authorities put him through a rather grueling interrogation. in which he allegedly confessed. He was eventually convicted of first-degree murder. He remains in prison, but he has appealed his conviction many times, and I’ve read a lot of stuff on it. I read the appellate briefings, and after reading those, I began to think, you know, maybe this Delisle guy wasn’t the only bad guy in the story. I changed the drowning to be pinned on the wife, Catriona Dulaney. The story is quite a bit different.”
The prosecution brings a well-regarded behavioral psychologist, a man who specializes in homicide-related investigations, to interview Catriona. Devyn believes that the psychologist made up his mind from the moment he walked into the room that Catriona is guilty of deliberately killing the infants and that all his questions and comments are designed to get her to confess. That finally happens, seven hours into the questioning, when Catriona cries, “My God. What have I done?” But Devyn isn’t convinced of her guilt. She abruptly switches sides to take on Catriona’s defense.
“In River Deep, the town divides, because you have these two families, the Paynes and the Dulaneys, who are the most prominent families. The tension between the Payne family, represented by the defense attorney, Devyn Payne, and the Dulaney family, represented by Catriona, has been well established in the first book, and it continues, to some extent, in River Deep. Half the town thinks Catriona should be convicted and put away forever, as a murderer, and the other half of the town thinks this is just the elite family in town, and the Paynes taking out their vengeance on the Dulaneys.”
These books are a slow burn, suspenseful, crime mystery. The stories are told from multiple points of view. Hidden resentments, longstanding grudges, and the dynamics of small-town life rise to the surface as the investigation deepens.
