SYNOPSIS
On a cold December day in Missoula, Montana, the police pull Clay Bennett's corpse from the weeds. For the cops, Bennett's death is an open-and-shut case, the result of a drunken brawl gone out of control. For repo woman Meg Gardner, who'd been looking to snag Bennett's Jeep, his death is an opportunity: Without him around to make life difficult, the job should be a breeze.
Only one year out of prison, romantically involved, and working the first legitimate job she's ever had, all Meg wants is to keep things clean and simple. So when Bennett's Jeep is broken into outside her house by a bunch of Russian thugs, instinct and experience demand that she walk away. But then she learns about the missing military plane Bennett had been hunting obsessively before he was killed -- the same plane he crashed in the wilderness forty years earlier. And when a tattooed woman with an astonishing facility for knives shows up in town, Meg has no choice but to seek the real cause of Bennett's death.
Desperate to protect what little she has, and driven by ghosts from her own past, Meg plunges ahead -- and finds herself involved in a dangerous web of infidelity, greed, and murder.
Darwin
So far, only one character has earned the dubious honor of appearing in more than one of my novels. When I was living in Seattle and working on Easy Money, one of my bar patrons told me a story of an incredible person he'd once known, an ex-Navy SEAL/drag queen/prostitute/heroin addict named Darwin. I immediately fell in love with this fascinating creature, and within a couple of days, she had found her way into my manuscript.
In the original version of Easy Money, Darwin was brutally killed. But so overwhelming was the outcry at her death from my editor and agent and everyone else who read the novel, that I finally rewrote the novel so that she survived.
After Easy Money was published, I got more and more comments about Darwin. On my promotional tour everyone wanted to know about her, whether she was real or not, and what would become of her in the future. I was working on Iced then, and I decided to oblige her fans by bringing her back. When we'd last seen Darwin, her life had been pretty miserable. As much as I and everyone else loved her and were routing for her, it only seemed right to clean her up and give her a somewhat respectable life.
But don't worry, the essence of Darwin will never change. She's still still strutting her stuff in stilettos and mini-skirts. Only this time, without the heroin habit and the creepy customers.