Austinist Book Review: The Hounds of Winter by James Magnuson

Fast forward several decades: at the start of the novel, David, having long since moved away from Black Hawk, is on his way back to spend the holidays with his estranged daughter, Maya, who's chosen to dedicate her life caring for the wolves that co-exist in a rapidly deteriorating relationship with the townsfolk. She is murdered, in a scene rendered in deliciously savage detail. He arrives to find her bloodied body sprawled out next to the fireplace of their rustic cabin, her skull smashed in with a poker stick. 

The sequence of events that proceeds is derived from the basic thriller genre: David pursuing the mysterious masked intruder into the woods, David becoming the prime suspect, David ditching the sheriffs, and David finding himself simultaneously hunting for his daughter's killer while being himself hunted. It sounds suspiciously like the prototypical blockbuster Hollywood production, a point that Magnuson - as David's interior monologue - deliberately shares with the reader, comparing his plight with that of Dustin Hoffman's in John Schlesinger's Marathon Man.

But while all of this makes for fascinating reading - and, in fact, we polished off all 273 pages in two sittings - the plot is merely the candy shell holding together the exquisite chocolate inside: embedded within The Hounds of Winter are formidable cerebral matters for the reader to contend with, whether they're the moral ambiguities of manufacturing wartime munitions, the diaphanous relationship between a father and daughter, or - at its core - this pathological need of David's to run away:

Maybe it didn't matter who you were fleeing [sic] - Nazis, Southern prison guards, bounty hunters - maybe that was all just a pretext, an excuse.  Maybe the point was to keep running: as long as you were running, there was no time to look back and see what doors were being quietly closed to you forever.

Our sole frustration with the novel was also what kept us thoroughly engrossed: there are almost more suspects than one can keep track of, whether it's the sheriff with a vendetta, the village idiot, the disgruntled barkeep, the jealous former lover, the crooked ex-politician, or, somehow, the Asian businessmen.  With nearly every alternating chapter David is convinced that he's finally discovered the identity his daughter's killer, only to realize towards the novel's end that perhaps all of this had to do with something far more insidious than he could possibly have imagined. But, of course, it didn't.

Magnuson is in top form with his latest novel. Austinist recommends The Hounds of Winter to anyone looking for a deeply psychological thriller - you can check out an excerpt for yourself at the University of Texas Press website.

The Hounds of Winter by James Magnuson is available in hardback from the University of Texas Press