The Snow Collectors

December 23, 2019
Hall sets a contemporary murder mystery in a snow-laden Northeastern town in her eerie debut novel (after The Physics of Imaginary Objects collection). Henna, an encyclopedia writer specializing in hydrology and Arctic expeditions, retreats to the frozen reaches of New England after the deaths of her twin sister and parents. Stumbling upon the body of a dead girl in the woods, Henna finds a fragment of a letter clutched in the girl’s hand; it was written by Lady Jane, wife of Capt. John Franklin, an Arctic explorer who was lost at sea in 1845. Henna’s interest is piqued, and she researches Jane at a local library before reporting the discovery to the police. As Henna pieces together a harrowing story of cannibalism on an Arctic expedition, rendered by Hall with short chapters evoking the voices of Jane and Capt. Franklin, Henna feels she’s being watched. Fletcher, the local police chief, takes a keen interest in the case, and in Henna, and their desire for one another flares. Fletcher, meanwhile, knows far more about the connection between the murder and the Arctic history than he lets on. Hall seamlessly weaves dreamlike imagery with descriptions of police procedure and scientific inquiry as Henna works to confirm her intuition that the murder’s connection to the past is real and not imagined. This elegant account of a woman’s confrontation with a cover-up delivers historical intrigue and emotional depth.

January 1, 2020
Hall has written a lovely, lush, surrealist book set in a cold, snowy village in a world where environmental collapse is beginning. Henna is a woman haunted by the grief of losing her parents and twin sister to the ocean; and after finding a frozen body in her yard, she is drawn into a mystery centered around the Franklin voyage that once disappeared into the Arctic. As scraps of old letters and shadows of intruders threaten her, Henna finds herself searching for her old dowsing skills, taking long cold walks with her dog Rembrandt, and combing through the local library's logs of snowfall and records of Lady Jane, Franklin's wife who spent her legacy funding voyages to find her husband's body and prove he did not, like much of his crew, become a cannibal. The book is atmospheric, compelling, and beautiful, infused with gentle, earthy fantasy and a soft push into the future, drawing deeply on the gothic genre. Hall's book is poetic and ghostly, haunting the reader with its intriguing story and its evocative imagery of ice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2019
A grieving woman researches a possible murder in this novel by Hall (The Physics of Imaginary Objects, 2010, etc.). One year and seven months after the loss of her parents and twin sister at sea, Henna, a freelance encyclopedia writer who specializes in entries having to do with water, moves to an unnamed village where her constant companions are the oppressive snow and her sister's basset hound, Rembrandt. When Henna finds a woman's dead body under a hawthorn bush at the edge of the woods, she resolves to find out the secret meaning of the woman's death, who was responsible for it, and how it's connected to Lady Jane Franklin's search for her Arctic-explorer husband, who disappeared with his two ships in 1845. Suspects include the "rakishly handsome" police chief, Fletcher, his unusual mother, Eleanor, and their alarmingly attractive and intrusive housekeeper, Dita. Is Fletcher innocent of the woman's death, or has Henna been "blinded by a spot of canoodling"? Birds, blood, the town library's tower room, and Fletcher's strange house combine with other elements to create a deliciously creepy atmosphere. The story is captivating and well paced apart from the heavy-handed reportage of Rembrandt's activities and an unremarkable ending. An inventive premise, lush imagery, and a shameful historical secret nicely elevate an otherwise formulaic cabin-in-the-woods story.

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