It’s Christmastime 1960 in Black River Falls, Iowa, but with an Indian summer keeping the temperature at 75 degrees, it sure doesn’t feel like winter. It’s so warm, in fact, that the Lucky Star Drive-In is still open, and Rick Conroy is still drag-racing the nights away with his friends on a deadly stretch of highway outside of town. When Rick slams fatally into a bridge at 90 miles an hour, holiday cheer veers toward foul play, for the police find his brake line to be as lacerated as his spine. The solution does not come easily for struggling lawyer and sometime-investigator Sam McCain, who is dragged into the case by the incorrigible Judge Esme Anne Whitney. Leads go nowhere, tensions mount. Add to that his personal problems—his father has lung cancer and a recent one-night stand is pointing to scandal—and it’s no wonder the holiday heat wave is making this McCain Christmas the darkest, and most dangerous, of the decade. [Sam McCain is] “the kind of hero any small town could take to its heart.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review Gorman wonderfully evokes the sorrows and pleasures of a certain Midwestern past.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gorman’s successful capturing of time and place ... sharply evokes the twilight of the ’50s.”—Los Angeles Times Read Less