Spotlight: Bitterfrost by Bryan Gruley

The first in a brand-new crime thriller series from Edgar nominee and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Bryan Gruley. Feisty defence attorney Devyn Payne faces off against veteran detective Garth Klimmek as they work to solve a vicious double homicide in their small, icy town of Bitterfrost.

Thirteen years ago, former ice hockey star Jimmy Baker quit the game after almost killing an opponent. Now, as the Zamboni driver for the amateur team in his hometown of Bitterfrost, Michigan, he’s living his penance. Until the morning he awakens to the smell of blood . . .

Jimmy soon finds himself arrested for a brutal double murder. The kicker? He has no memory of the night in question. And as the evidence racks up against him, Jimmy’s case is skating on thin ice. Could he have committed such a gruesome crime?

Excerpt

ONE

Jimmy wakes to a pinging sound in his head.

And the smell of blood.

He sits up, too quickly, and pain blazes up from the base of his neck and wells inside his skull like a fist forcing its way out. He shuts his eyes, trying to squeeze it away. The high-pitched pinging ebbs but the throb persists.

He opens his eyes. He’s sitting on his kitchen floor in the dark. He checks the clock on the microwave: three fifty-three. He’s still wearing the black-and-silver IceKings jacket he wore to the hockey rink and then to the Lost Loon Tavern. A draft of winter air cascades over his face. He sees his back door is open six inches and trembling on its hinges. He gets up to close it and notices he’s wearing only one boot. He hobbles outside on his booted leg. The security light blinks on. Jimmy’s other boot is lying on its side on the porch step. As he squats to pull it on, he spies a ragged path of packed-down snow leading away from the porch. As if someone dragged in an animal.

He goes back inside, closes the door, and flicks on the lamp hanging over the kitchen table. Still smelling blood, he lifts his left hand to his face. ‘Jesus,’ he says. The hand is spackled with dried blood, the knuckles a hash of shredded skin and exposed bone a shade of rust. Blood spatters the silver sleeve of his jacket from wrist to elbow. As he stares at it, the hand begins to ache like it would after pounding some guy’s forehead and cheekbones in the middle of a hockey game. What did he do to himself? Or, God forbid, to someone else? He’s seen his hand like this before, but it’s been a long time, when he was still playing in the minors.

The thrum in his skull is deafening. He can’t think straight. He goes to the sink, splashes water on his face and neck. It doesn’t help. He gazes out the window over the sink. Outside is black all the way to the tree line several hundred yards away. All Jimmy can see is his reflection in the glimmer from the overhead lamp. A strawberry of a lump has risen on his right cheek. He touches two fingertips to it. It stings. 

He turns the water on hot, squirts dishwashing liquid on the hand, and washes the blood off as best he can, the soap tingling in the spots where the knuckle skin is shorn. The hand comes clean enough, but he’ll have to put his jacket in the wash and wear something else to work. That’s not ideal because it’s a game day and everyone, especially Jimmy, driver of the Zamboni, is expected to be in IceKings gear. 

He checks his back pocket for his wallet – it’s there – but, patting himself, finds no cellphone. Maybe in the truck. He goes to the garage. It’s empty. He hits the garage-door opener. As it rattles upward, he sees his truck parked at an odd angle across the two-tire drive that bends through a span of sparse woods to his house. 

Why is the truck outside? Did his garage-door opener malfunction earlier? He can’t recall. Did his one drink keep him from parking properly? Or was someone else driving? None of this is right. But he can’t remember how it got wrong. His stomach clenches. He feels afraid but doesn’t know what he feels afraid of. Which frightens him even more. And, man, it’s cold. Must be twenty below. He wraps his arms around himself and walks to the truck, shivering. 

Whenever Jimmy’s driving, he stuffs his phone in one of the coffee cup holders on the center console. It’s not in either of those. He leans across the driver seat to check the passenger side, grabbing the steering wheel for balance. The wheel is tacky on his palm. More blood? Holy shit, he thinks. Somebody got hurt. 

His breath billows white around his head. He checks the glove box, searches under the seats, rummages through the back seat. No phone. Goddamn. His boss will start texting him at seven and won’t stop till opening puck drop twelve hours later. He sits in the back seat, hands gripping his knees, trying to think: Did he leave the phone at the Loon? He doesn’t remember using it there; he usually turns it off before he goes in. 

Memory loss is an occupational hazard for a former hockey fighter who took a slew of blows to the head while delivering more than his share to other heads. If a doctor opened up his skull, Jimmy suspects they’d find tangles of that CTE stuff that supposedly blots out memory and drags its bearers to an early death. Still, this morning’s full-blown blackout is peculiar, more like the sort that plagued Jimmy when he was heavy into the booze, after the lawsuits and the publicity and the divorce and the child custody fight. Basically, the whole damn night from the time he left the Loon is missing.

He tries to picture the Loon, where he was sitting, Ronnie behind the bar. He recalls having words, though nothing too bad, with a couple of guys who might have been giving Ronnie a hard time. For some reason he remembers thinking they must have been from downstate, probably Detroit or thereabouts. There was a woman in an orange hoodie. Not much else is coming. He figures he’ll call Ronnie as soon as she might be awake, she’ll clear things up. But then he thinks, no, dumb shit, you have no phone. 

He twists himself around and digs in the crack between the seat and the seat back. Nothing there. He clambers back into the front and tries those seats. Nothing in the driver’s side, but his fingertips brush something solid on the passenger side. He pulls his arm out and yanks his coat and shirtsleeves up, then plunges back in and comes out with his phone. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he says, feeling something he hopes isn’t blood caked on the casing. He tries to turn the phone on, but it’s out of juice. Why would it have been jammed into the seat like that? Jimmy can’t believe he would’ve put it there on his own. Unless he was trying to hide it. But why? From whom? 

His right ring finger has gone numb from the cold. He starts the truck and pulls it into the garage. The stuff on the steering wheel feels like tar. Jimmy puts a palm to his face and sniffs. He used to think when he fought two or three times a week that he could smell the difference between his own blood and another guy’s. That was bullshit, just like it was bullshit that beating people up would propel him to the National Hockey League. 

He needs to clean the steering wheel and check the rest of the truck for blood, but he doesn’t want to freeze to death, so he goes inside and rubs his gluey hands warm then plugs the cell into the outlet next to the fridge. He goes back to the sink to rinse his hands and checks his reflection in the kitchen window. He’s gotta get some ice on that swollen cheek. People are going to ask about it. Which makes him wonder if he ought to call the cops. 

For what, though? What’s he gonna tell them? There’s blood in my truck but I don’t know why? I have no idea how I got this shiner? Or why my knuckles look like spaghetti? I had one drink and can’t remember much else because my brain is a sieve? 

No. 

He takes an ice pack from the freezer and presses it onto his cheek. He decides he’ll give the truck a onceover later, before heading to the rink. A little snooze, some cleaning up, and everything will be fine. He tells himself he must have gotten into it with somebody, they got the jump on him somehow, and now, here he is. 

He goes to the front room and sits on the sofa, holding the ice pack to his face beneath the framed photos of Avery when she was three, six, eight, eleven. His favorite is eight, where she’s standing in unruly pigtails at the end of the Bitterfrost pier at sundown, showing off a steelhead she pulled from Lake Michigan that’s almost as big as her. The house is dark and quiet but for the tocking of an old grandfather clock across the room. Jimmy has to be up and rolling in less than two hours. 

In his head he says his nightly prayers. For Mama, long gone. For Avery, of course, extra prayers for her, and even for Noelle. For the Richards family, especially Cory. And, tonight, a prayer for his bud Ronnie, who may have had a rough go at the Loon. It’s still too early to call her, but maybe a text. He gets off the couch and goes into the kitchen for his phone, now at thirty-one percent power. There’s a text from his pal Devyn that arrived at one fifty-three: Tell me you’re not in trouble. 

Jimmy swallows hard. ‘Shit, Dev,’ he says aloud. 

He calls up his regular text string with Ronnie. He’s about to start typing when he sees a text he does not recall sending. It left his phone at two forty-two: those two jagoff’s won’t be bothering you again.

Buy on Amazon Kindle | Hardcover | Bookshop.org

About the Author

Bryan Gruley is the Edgar-nominated author of six novels – PURGATORY BAY, BLEAK HARBOR, the Starvation Lake Trilogy, and his most recent, BITTERFROST (April 1, 2025; Severn House) - and one award-winning work of nonfiction. A lifelong journalist, he shared in The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He lives in northern lower Michigan with his wife, Pamela, where he can be found playing hockey, singing in his band, or spending time with his children and grandchildren. You can visit him online at bryangruley.com.