Winter The story of a season

Review by Booklist Review

It is always Scotland the Brave for its people, especially in winter, when incessant drizzle and bitter winds conspire to chill right down to the bones. For McDermid, noted crime writer and queen of the genre known as tartan noir, the cold and darkness bring a clarity she claims "makes it easy to follow strange tracks in my mind." The reader will follow her down many paths, from her childhood to the present, in celebration of her homeland and all of its frosty glories. McDermid describes fiery festivals, warm and woolly clothing, sustaining soups, whisky, and even the traditional crab apple jelly. The birch trees' "slender white trunks glimmer like ghosts in the darkness" as they endure the harsh, poor progression of the seasons. McDermid's writing is lyrical, often profound, and thoroughly enjoyable. The perfect read for all lovers of nature tales and things Caledonian and for McDermid's fans, who will appreciate the insights into her creative process and the environment within which her brilliant novels are often set.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Tartan noir master McDermid (Past Lives) flexes her talent for evocative description in this appealing collection about "memories of winters past and appreciation of winters present." In 20 short, vivid essays, McDermid transports readers to such settings as Oxford, where "winter is cold and damp, miserable vapours from the rivers shrouding the dreaming spires," and Edinburgh, where she recalls standing on her father's shoulders at six years old so she could see a public hanging, the bleakness of the deep-winter spectacle tempered by the beauty of the surrounding architecture. Not every section is quite so dark: on cooking for cold weather, McDermid is funny ("I believe the world is divided in two: those who think soup is a meal and those who are wrong"), and on her habit of starting the new year with ambitious writing projects, she's self-deprecating ("The notes I scrawl are incomprehensible to me, even a few days later"). Though the book's scope is modest, and there's little in the way of insight about her fiction-writing process, McDermid proves an amiable narrator with an endearing fondness for the year's dreariest months. It's a satisfying collection of literary amuse-bouches. (Jan.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Silent snow. Scottish crime novelist McDermid is best known for her uncompromisingly realistic "Tartan Noir" detective stories, featuring the down and out, the violent, and the vain. But pick up this book, and you'd never know it. This is a sweet, reflective memoir on the cold season in Scotland. McDermid remembers "guising," a kind of proto-Halloween tradition of dressing up in late October. She recalls Guy Fawkes Day bonfires. She luxuriates in the warmth of Christmas hearths. Edinburgh itself becomes a personality: "a city addicted to the crash, bang, wallop that goes with the heavenly glamour cascading down Castle Rock from the Esplanade to the gardens below. The city doesn't confine itself to 5 November nor does it wait for winter--on every night of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo during the festival month of August the sound of fireworks reverberates through the city centre." There is an easy domesticity to the reflections here. "Winter means soup," and in paragraphs of recipes and memories of meals, McDermid writes a story of her own creative life. Writing is like cooking. As her Scottish mother says, "There isnae a recipe" for soup. "More a rummage." And so, we rummage through her childhood, as each holiday and farm and street corner go deep into the stockpot, simmered until they blend into a heady literary broth. Illustrated with charming woodcuts, with just over a hundred pages of large type, the book is a warm bowl, fit for an hour by the fire. Readers of McDermid's fiction may miss the blood and anger of crime. Instead, here, you can almost hear the carolers amid the snow and pan across the quiet fields. An endearing panorama of Scottish winters, told by a crime novelist on holiday from horror. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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