Iced

Having established herself as one of the new talents in tough gal crime fiction with last year's Easy Money, Siler stays with the form in her latest, though she introduces a new lead character and locale. Her protagonist is Meg Gardner, a hard-living, whiskey-drinking repo woman from Missoula, Mont., just out of prison for stabbing her boyfriend. Gardner isn't looking for trouble, but when she stumbles onto a crime scene in the middle of a routine repossession, she finds herself mixed up in a sticky investigation into the death of local travel agent Clayton Bennett. On the back seat of the dead man's SUV is a briefcase containing a bunch of maps of the remote mountains north of town. Before Gardner can return the car to the repo company, two tough individualsDa Russian mobster and a brute of a womanDdrop by for a visit, demanding the briefcase. Gardner gives it to the Russian, then starts poking around into Bennett's private life. She learns of a mysterious incident nearly 50 years earlier in which Bennett, at the time an Air Force reserve pilot, crash-landed a plane high in the Bitterroots range. Given up for dead, he reemerged two months later, babbling incoherently. Ever since, Bennett has been trying to locate the crash site. Gardner, and now several others, want to know why. Though it lacks a solid punch at its end, Siler's second novel shows fine movement and rhythm. She handles the hard-boiled writing style with a natural grace, never sounding forced or stagy. Her flashback-heavy construction of Gardner's character gets tiresome, but it effectively reveals Gardner as a complex soul, faithless and dour, as rugged as the Montana wilderness. Agent, Nat Sobel. Author tour. (Jan. 11)