Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Rural Vermont will never look the same again once you wander past the apple trees and find that no one answers their door…
Cloudland
What you need to know before your trail
Once a major reporter for a national newspaper, Catherine Winslow has retreated to the Upper Valley of Vermont to live a quieter life. While out walking one snowy day, Catherine Winslow, discovers the body of a woman leaning against an apple tree near her house.
Winslow recognizes her jacket as that of a woman reported missing weeks before during a blizzard.
As she soon discovers, she has just entered the most bizarre situation – that of a serial killer who seems to be modelling their killings on a rare unfinished Wilkie Collins novel that is missing from her personal library.
Travel Guide
Cloudland
A fictional setting in rural Vermont – there seems to be a link to many people and locations in and around the area. The snow at the start is melting and when the snow melts, a lot of what lies beneath is revealed in more ways than one –
“When the ice finally thawed and the ponds caved in with a bellow, those apple trees where I had found her had begun to throw their buds.”
The remoteness of Cloudland
“The night Angela Parker was stabbed and dumped unceremoniously in the apple orchard, there were no lost tourists, no invasion of headlamps; we had a snowstorm with blizzard conditions. The flakes were funneling down like pestilence, stinging my nineteenth-century windows.”
The rural setting
In Vermont, July daylight lingers until just after nine pm. Brightly colored flowers harbor their glow, birch trees beam their whiteness, and the hush is filled with the song of locusts that starts up and trails off intermittently, leaving the throaty rattles of nocturnal birds.
Booktrailer Review
The novel is unusual for many reasons – this is not a serial killer thriller despite the loose threads of one, Rather the novel is one of character and the feeling of isolation in al its forms.
The snow and the rural setting obviously adding to the shock and horror of how these bodies are being placed, and found, and what the dangers are for the residents of this small community. The presence of human failings is revealed in several layers which melt through the book and like the snow, reveal a lot more than that which we see at the surface.
The overlying emotion is one of unease and the various characters which come into Catherine’s world. It turns out that many people in Cloudland have different reasons for lying about their whereabouts during the times these murders were committed.
Sometimes, the murder investigation almost strangely disappears into the background and the sole focus becomes Catherine. However it soon becomes clear as to why this is done and its not for the reasons you may think. There are also lots of red herrings – not all of them necessary – but they do add to the confusion and chaos of the investigation in a closed off and remote community.
Where Next?
