The Long White Quiet

It is January in Quarry Hollow, Vermont, three years after retired intelligence officer Julian Fenwick’s alpaca farm first became the center of a murder investigation. When Julian finds Ev Cutler, the valley’s oldest and most careful resident, dead in his own woodshed on the coldest morning of the winter, the scene tells him plainly what the rest of the county wants badly to believe isn’t true: an eighty-three-year-old man’s heart did not simply give out. Someone was in that shed with him.Sheriff Dana Voss brings in a new state investigator, Reinholt, and together they lean on Julian’s particular reading of the ground once again. A wrong-angled maul, a set of tracks that only go one direction, and a llama’s fixed attention toward a distant tree line lead them to a boot print with a clean sightline to Ev’s back door. The trail points, slowly, to Ashcroft Land Trust, a locally filed company that quietly bought up quarry-adjacent land the same year a 1984 closure ruined half the valley’s future-and from there to Judith Fenn, a sitting Selectboard member who never knew her own late mother had been one of the trust’s three original trustees.But the true danger traces back further than old family shame. Judith’s husband, Daniel Fenn, frightened by an unrelated bank title review, quietly hired a Boston investigation firm months before Ev ever approached him directly, and lost control of what that firm’s senior field investigator, Victor Lassen, decided the job actually required. As a historic storm closes every road into the valley, Julian, Dana, and Reinholt race to identify Lassen before the weather traps him alongside everyone else, while the whole town shelters together at Merle Attwood’s general store and a delayed memory finally surfaces the evidence that breaks the case open.In this atmospheric small-town mystery, violence outsourced and planned at a professional distance collides with a community forced to reckon with a colder kind of guilt. Some secrets are buried in documents. Some are buried in snow. And some refuse to stay buried at all.