Snow Garden

In the darkening chill of winter, three Atherton University freshmen are being mysteriously drawn together by fate, and a compulsion they cannot comprehend. Though they come from vastly differing backgrounds, the college holds the promise of a better life for each of them — and an opportunity to break away from the anguish and desolation of their former lives.

But the past does not die so easily, and the intricate webs of deceit that they have spun to protect themselves are slowly twisted into shackles that chain them to their doom. Snowbound and trapped on the campus, the friends find themselves unwilling pawns in the machinations of a malevolent force that has taken hold of Atherton — and all their oldest fears, veiled passions, and secret nightmares are about to come to life in...The Snow Garden.

2002 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Gay Men's Mystery

Atherton University, freshman year.
Kathryn, Randall, and Jesse come from different worlds, but find themselves drawn together in unexpected ways. For each of them, college promises a bright future and a way to disconnect from a dark, haunted past. But as winter sets in, their secret histories threaten to disrupt the layers of deceit that protect their fragile new lives.

One dark night a professor's wife is found drowned in an icy river, and rumors of murder threaten the safe haven of Atherton. Within days, Randall's illicit affair with the professor is about to be revealed in the local press. Then, an old mystery emerges from the shadows - the discovery of a co-ed's corpse in a frozen creek twenty years before makes these accidents of the past and the present look a little too closely connected. Gradually, the three friends find themselves snared in a web of lies, a web spun long before their days at Atherton. Snowbound on the university campus, they are unwitting captives of a malevolent force that drives them inexorably toward the "snow garden" of the title - a place of nightmares that is all too real, and all too near.

Advocate

The Snow Garden offers finely nuanced character studies as its pages whiz by to its chilling conclusion.

Christopher Rice is the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden. The son of author Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice, he lives in Los Angeles.