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  • Published: 15 July 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143128885
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $38.00

Cold Hearted River

A Novel



In the sixth novel in the acclaimed Sean Stranahan mystery series, Montana's favorite detective finds himself on the trail of Ernest Hemingway's missing steamer trunk.

In the sixth novel in the acclaimed Sean Stranahan mystery series, Montana's favorite detective finds himself on the trail of Ernest Hemingway's missing steamer trunk. 

“Keith McCafferty is a top-notch, first-rate, can’t-miss novelist.”
—C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author 

When a woman goes missing in a spring snowstorm and is found dead in a bear's den, Sheriff Martha Ettinger reunites with her once-again lover Sean Stranahan to investigate. In a pannier of the dead woman's horse, they find a wallet of old trout flies, the leather engraved with the initials EH. Only a few days before, Patrick Willoughby, the president of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club, had been approached by a man selling fishing gear that he claimed once belonged to Ernest Hemingway. A coincidence? Sean doesn't think so, and he soon finds himself on the trail of a stolen trunk rumored to contain not only the famous writer's valuable fly fishing gear but priceless pages of unpublished work.

The investigation will take Sean through extraordinary chapters in Hemingway's life. Inspired by a true story, Cold Hearted River is a thrilling adventure, moving from Montana to Michigan, where a woman grapples with the secrets in her heart, to a cabin in Wyoming under the Froze To Death Plateau, and finally to the ruins in Havana, where an old man struggles to complete his life's mission one true sentence at a time.

  • Published: 15 July 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143128885
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $38.00

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Praise for Cold Hearted River

"When a book begins with a harrowing struggle for survival in the Montana mountains and uses as its MacGuffin a lost trunk of Ernest Hemingway's fishing tackle (with the tantalizing possibility of lost manuscripts tucked inside), you know you're not in for a run-of-the-mill mystery . . . McCafferty's skill at creating memorable characters has even the walk-ons warming to the spotlight...bittersweet."--Booklist

"Colorful characters and forbidding locales complement the book's central puzzle, which has surprising real-life roots."--Publishers Weekly

Praise for Buffalo Jump Blues:

"Explosive, gripping and not to be missed. Keith McCafferty gets the West just right with its cast of individualistic characters, stunning backdrops and a past that breaks through in violent and unexpected ways. Buffalo Jump Blues is an impressive crime novel, and McCafferty is an impressive writer."--Margaret Coel, New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Fell From the Sky and Winter's Child