Aptly subtitled "A Novel of Secrets," this dark, probing tale examines the destructive ripple effects of a child's death on those around her--especially after doubts arise whether it was accident, suicide, or murder. In the harrowing opening pages, 16-year-old Katherine Chadwick ODs on heroin while babysitting little Mallory, daughter of her parents' best friends. Then the tale leaps forward nine years: both couples' marriages are in ruins; Katherine's father, once a schoolteacher, is now a bruising "escort" for a reform school in the Texas outback called Cold Springs; and his next assignment is to capture none other than Mallory, now 15 and in trouble.

Texas native Riordan, whose Tres Navarre series has earned acclaim and awards, evokes the landscapes around Cold Springs with vividness and authority, and also brings that sensibility to the book's Bay Area scenes: Chadwick ... stepped out into the growing gloom of the evening. Down the block, he could hear the lowrider cruising, its stereo setting off car alarms all across the neighborhood like a bloodhound flushing quail. But it's the book's complex plot and richly realized people--most notably its troubled teenagers (Riordan is a middle-school teacher)--that give Cold Springs substance and heft. You may need to persist through some tangled exposition in the first 75 pages or so, but the payoff is well worth it. The long climax offers a stunning series of cascading revelations, including a final kicker that changes everything. Riordan is the real deal. --Nicholas H. Allison


From Publishers Weekly
Riordan is a middle-school teacher in San Antonio, which explains why this unorthodox suspense novel-Riordan's first break from his Edgar-, Shamus- and Anthony-winning series about private detective Tres Navarre (The Devil Went Down to Austin, etc.)-centers around two very different kinds of schools. One is Laurel Heights, a private middle school in San Francisco, where a dedicated staff deals with the needs of the privileged children of the affluent. The other is Cold Springs, a survival school in the mountain country of Texas, where a former army Ranger rescues teenagers who have slipped over the edge. Linking the two schools is Chadwick, a huge man who looks like George Washington; he teaches history at Laurel Heights and then becomes an escort at Cold Springs (run by his old Vietnam buddy) when his own teenaged daughter, Katherine, dies of a drug overdose. Chadwick, who blames himself for Katherine's death (he was about to leave his wife for Ann Zedman, the woman who runs Laurel Heights), is a complex and interesting character, and the pressures on him are believable and absorbing-especially when Ann's daughter, Mallory, becomes a Cold Springs candidate. Riordan tilts the playing field by introducing a truly dysfunctional family, the Montroses, and tracing a string of murders related to Katherine's death. Knife-throwing, wild shooting and hairbreadth escapes up the ante, sometimes to the point of overkill, but Riordan is so good at moving his story along-and showing how fragile children's lives can be-that most readers will forgive him his excesses. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Riordan, a relative newcomer with four previous books to his credit, has walked away with just about every prestigious mystery-writing award there is: the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Anthony. As soon as you start reading Riordan, you understand the acclaim. His voice is fresh yet sure, with insights so trenchant they nearly provoke tears. And Riordan's characters, even the minor ones, are achingly believable. And the action proceeds realistically from the strengths and flaws of the characters, with some sucker punches from fate thrown in. This time Riordan rests his series hero, Tres Navarre, and takes us on a journey with Chadwick, whose job, born out of his own heartbreak, is to escort drug-addicted kids to Cold Springs, a tough-love wilderness school in Texas. Throughout the book, one day haunts Chadwick, the day in 1993 when he discovered his teen daughter dead from a heroin overdose. Chadwick quits his middle-school teaching job, leaves his marriage, and jettisons most of the other aspects of his life to devote himself to tracking down troubled teens. Ten years after his daughter's death, Chadwick's ex-principal and ex-lover asks him to escort her daughter (whom Chadwick's daughter was baby-sitting when she overdosed) to Cold Springs. This simple act lands Chadwick in the complexities of a murder case that can only be solved by confronting the drug dealers of his daughter's past. Gut-wrenching. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Rick Riordan is the author of Big Red Tequila, The Widower’s Two-Step, The Last King of Texas, and, most recently, The Devil Went Down to Austin, which was nominated for both the Shamus and the Anthony awards. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he is at work on his sixth novel of suspense.


Review
Rick Riordan is the author of Big Red Tequila, The Widower?s Two-Step, The Last King of Texas, and, most recently, The Devil Went Down to Austin, which was nominated for both the Shamus and the Anthony awards. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he is at work on his sixth novel of suspense.


Book Description
The Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony award-winning Rick Riordan delivers a spellbinding novel of a man on an edge so extreme that his fall will destroy not only him--but all that he holds dear.

Cold Springs

Chadwick’s life was balanced on a knife’s edge--his career, his marriage, his
relationship with his dangerously troubled daughter. And then one autumn night, the worst possible thing happened….

Now, a decade later, Chadwick’s heart is on the mend. Working for an old military buddy, he saves kids for a living, escorting troubled teens to a Texas wilderness school that specializes in the toughest brand of love.

Until he gets a phone call that threatens to shatter his new life.

Mallory Zedman is taking the same terrible path Chadwick’s own daughter once took. Defiant and out of control, Mallory is determined to destroy herself and anyone who tries to stop her. No sooner does Chadwick snatch her off the streets than he discovers she is wanted for questioning in a brutal murder--a slaying that seems directly linked to Chadwick’s past.To save Mallory, tough love will not be enough. Chadwick must find the truth behind the murder--and in doing so revisit the infidelities, shattered promises, and violent passions that cracked his world apart. And he must jeopardize the one thing he still has left to lose--a slim hope of redemption.


From the Inside Flap
The Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony award-winning Rick Riordan delivers a spellbinding novel of a man on an edge so extreme that his fall will destroy not only him--but all that he holds dear.

Cold Springs

Chadwick’s life was balanced on a knife’s edge--his career, his marriage, his
relationship with his dangerously troubled daughter. And then one autumn night, the worst possible thing happened….

Now, a decade later, Chadwick’s heart is on the mend. Working for an old military buddy, he saves kids for a living, escorting troubled teens to a Texas wilderness school that specializes in the toughest brand of love.

Until he gets a phone call that threatens to shatter his new life.

Mallory Zedman is taking the same terrible path Chadwick’s own daughter once took. Defiant and out of control, Mallory is determined to destroy herself and anyone who tries to stop her. No sooner does Chadwick snatch her off the streets than he discovers she is wanted for questioning in a brutal murder--a slaying that seems directly linked to Chadwick’s past.To save Mallory, tough love will not be enough. Chadwick must find the truth behind the murder--and in doing so revisit the infidelities, shattered promises, and violent passions that cracked his world apart. And he must jeopardize the one thing he still has left to lose--a slim hope of redemption.


From the Back Cover
Rick Riordan is the author of Big Red Tequila, The Widower’s Two-Step, The Last King of Texas, and, most recently, The Devil Went Down to Austin, which was nominated for both the Shamus and the Anthony awards. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he is at work on his sixth novel of suspense.


About the Author
Rick Riordan is the author of Big Red Tequila, The Widower’s Two-Step, The Last King of Texas, and, most recently, The Devil Went Down to Austin, which was nominated for both the Shamus and the Anthony awards. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he is at work on his sixth novel of suspense.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chadwick struggled with his bow tie.

He was thinking about what he would say, how he would break the news that would end his marriage, when Norma came up behind him and told him about the heroin in their daughter's underwear drawer.

He turned, the bow tie unraveling in his fingers.

Norma wore only her slip, her bare arms as smooth and perfectly muscled as they'd been when she was nineteen. Her eyes glowed with that black heat she saved for lovemaking and really huge arguments, and he was pretty sure which she was planning for.

"Heroin," he said.

"In a Ziploc, yeah. Looked like brown sugar."

"What'd you do with it?"

"I smoked it. What do you think? I flushed it down the toilet."

"You flushed it down the toilet. Jesus, Norma."

"It wasn't hers. She was keeping it for a friend."

"You believed that?"

"She's my daughter. Yes, I believed her."

Chadwick stared out the window, down at Mission Street, where the Christmas lights popped and sparked under the sudden weight of ice.

He'd lived in this house almost all of his thirty-seven years, and he couldn't remember a November night this cold. The glass storefront of the corner taquer'a was greasy with steam. Lowriders cruised the boulevard billowing smoke from their exhaust pipes. Twenty-fourth Street station was swept clean of the homeless--all gone to shelters, leaving behind piles of summer clothes like insect husks. Next door, the Romos had turned up their music the way other people turn up the heater--the sorrowful heartbeat of narcocorrido pulsing through the townhouse's wallpaper.

Chadwick wanted to turn to steam and disperse against the glass. He wanted to escape from what he had to do, what he had to say. And now this--Katherine.

"The Zedmans will be here in a few minutes," he told Norma. "I've been home since yesterday."

She tilted her head to put on an earring. "What? I should've told you earlier? Last week I needed your help, you ran off to Texas. Maybe I should've told you at the airport, huh? Let you get right back on the plane?"

Chadwick felt his throat constricting. His Air Force buddy Hunter used to tease him about marrying Norma Reyes. Hunter said he wasn't getting a wife, he was getting a Cuban Missile Crisis.

He wanted to tell her why he'd really run.

He wanted to tell her that out there in the woods of Texas--for a few days--he had remembered why he'd fallen in love with her. He'd remembered a time when he'd been excited to have a woman half his size take him on so fearlessly, grab his hand like a toddler's grip on a shiny new toy and pull him onto the dance floor with a look that said, Yeah, I want to marry an Air Force man. You got a problem with that?

He had decided Norma deserved the truth, even if it destroyed them. But that had been at a distance of two thousand miles. Now, getting too close, the feeling was like a computer photo. Expand it too much, and it turned into pixels of random color.

He shucked his tuxedo coat, walked down the hallway to Katherine's room, Norma calling from behind, "I've already grounded her, Chadwick. Don't make it worse."

Katherine was on her bed, her back to the wall, her knees up to her chin--prepared for the assault. The Guatemalan fabric had fallen off her headboard, revealing the decorations Chadwick had painted when Katherine was two--rainbows and stars, a baby-blue cow jumping over a beaming moon. Kurt Cobain's picture sagged off the wall above, where Babar the Elephant used to be.

Sadness twisted into Chadwick's chest like a corkscrew. How the hell had Katherine turned sixteen? What happened to six? What happened to ten?

He tried to see something of himself in her, but Norma had dominated their daughter's genes completely. Katherine had her mother's fiery eyes, her defiant pout. She had the coffee skin, the lush black hair, the build that was both petite and combat-sturdy. As a child, Katherine would clench her fists and lock her knees and she'd be impossible to pick up--as if she were molded from stone.

"Heroin," Chadwick said.

She rubbed her silver necklace back and forth over her lips, like a zipper. "I told Mom. It wasn't mine."

"You went back." Chadwick tried to keep his voice even. "After everything we talked about."

"Daddy, look, a friend asked me to keep the stuff. A friend from school."

"Who?"

"It doesn't matter. It's over. Okay? I didn't want to piss him off. I was going to throw the stuff away, give it back, whatever. I didn't have time. Happy?"

Chadwick needed to believe her. He needed to so badly her words gained substance the more he thought about them, began to harden into a viable foundation. But goddamn it. After last Saturday . . .

He wanted to grab Katherine by the shoulders. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her until she went back to being his little girl. He wanted to take her away from here, whether Norma liked it or not, put her on a plane to Texas, bring her to Asa Hunter's woods, teach her how to live all over again, from scratch.

It had seemed so simple when he talked to Hunter. Hunter saw things the way a gun did--narrow, precise, certain. Hunter had coached him, prepared him on what to say to Norma. He'd let Chadwick imagine Katherine walking those woods, free from drugs and self-destructive friends and pictures of asshole rock stars on her wall. He'd even offered Chadwick a job as an escort, picking up troubled kids from around the country and bringing them to the ranch.

This school I'm starting-- It is the future, man. Get your family out of that poison city.

"Katherine," Chadwick said, "I want to help you."

"How, Daddy?" Her voice was tight with anger. "How do you want to do that?"

Chadwick caught his own face in Katherine's mirror. He looked haggard and nervous, a hungry transient pulled from some underpass and stuffed into a tux shirt.

He sat next to her on the bed, put his hand next to hers. He didn't touch her. He hadn't given his daughter a hug or a kiss in . . . weeks, anyway. He didn't remember. The distance you have to develop between a father and a daughter as she grew into a woman--he understood it, but it killed him sometimes.

"I want you to go to Texas," Chadwick said. "The boarding school."

"You want to get rid of me."

"This isn't working for you, Katherine. School, home, nothing."

"You're giving me a choice? If you're giving me a choice, I say no."

"I want you to agree. It would be easier."

"Mom won't go for it otherwise," she translated.

Chadwick's face burned. He hated that he and Norma couldn't speak with one voice, that they played these games, maneuvering for Katherine's cooperation the way a divorced couple would.

Katherine kept rubbing the necklace against her lips. It seemed like yesterday he'd given it to her--her thirteenth birthday.

"You can't baby-sit tonight," he decided. "We'll tell the Zedmans we can't go."

"Daddy, I'm fine. It's just Mallory. I've watched her a million times. Go to the auction."

Chadwick hesitated, knowing that he had no choice. He'd been gone from work the entire week. He couldn't very well miss the auction, too. "Give me your car keys."

"Come on, Daddy."

He held out his hand.

Katherine fished her Toyota key out of her pocket, dropped it into his palm.

"Where's your key chain?" he asked.

"What?"

"Your Disneyland key chain."

"I got tired of it," she said. "Gave it away."

"Last week you gave away your jacket. A hundred-dollar jacket."

"Daddy, I hated that jacket."

"You aren't a charity, Katherine. Don't give away your things."

She looked at him the way she used to when she was small--as if she wanted to touch her fingertips to his chin, his nose, his eyebrows, memorize his face. Chadwick felt like he was melting inside.

Down in the stairwell, the doorbell rang. John Zedman called up, "Candygram."

"This isn't over, Katherine," Chadwick said. "I want to talk about this when I get home."

She brushed a tear off her cheek.

"Katherine. Understood?"

"Yeah, Daddy. Understood."

She made the last word small and hot, instantly igniting Chadwick's guilt. He wanted to explain. He wanted to tell her he really had tried to make things work out. He really did love her.

"Chadwick?" Norma said behind him, her tone a warning. "The Zedmans are here."

Little Mallory made her usual entrance--a blur of blond hair and oversized T-shirt making a flying leap onto Katherine's bed.

"Kaferine!"

And Katherine transformed into that other girl--the one who could attract younger kids like an ice cream wagon song; the natural baby-sitter who always smiled and was oh so responsible and made other parents tell Chadwick with a touch of envy, "You are so lucky!" Chadwick saw that side of Katherine less and less.

She tousled Mallory's hair. "Hey, Peewee. Ready to have some fun?"

"Yesss!"

"I got Candyland. I got Equestrian Barbie. We are set to party."

Mallory gave her a high five.

Ann and John stood in the living room, cologne and perfume a gentle aura around them.

"Well," John said, registering at once that Chadwick wasn't even half ready to go. "Grizzly Adams, back from the wild."

"The carnivores say hello," Chadwick told him. "They want you to write home more often."

"Ouch," John said, his smile a little too brilliant. "I'll get you for that."

Ann wouldn't make eye contact with him. She gave Norma a hug--Norma having dressed in record time, looking dangerous in a red and yellow silk dress, like a size-four nuclear explosion.

Chadwick excused himself to finish getting ready. He listened to Norma and Ann talk about the school auction, John flipping through Chadwick's music collection, shouting innocuous questions to him about Yo-Yo Ma and Brahms, Mallory setting off all the clocks on the mantel--her ritual reintroduction to the house.

When Chadwick came out again, Katherine sat cross-legged by the fireplace--his beautiful girl, all grown up, drowning in flannel grunge and uncombed hair. Mallory sat on her lap, winding the hands of an old clock, trying to get it to chime.

Chadwick locked eyes with his daughter. He felt a tug in his chest, warning him not to go.

"Don't worry, Dad," she said. "We'll be fine."

Those words would be burned into Chadwick's forehead. They would live there, laser-hot, for the rest of his life.

When the front door shut, Katherine felt herself deflating, the little knots in her joints coming loose.

She took Candyland down from the shelf. She joked with Mallory and smiled as they drew color cards, but inside she felt the black sadness that was always just underneath her fingernails and behind her eyes, ready to break through.

Katherine wanted a fix. She knew it would only make her depression worse--buoy her up for a little while, then make the blackness wider, the edges of the chasm harder to keep her feet on. Her therapist had warned her. Ann Zedman had warned her. Her father had warned her. They were all part of the educational team, all looking out for her best interests.

We're here to help you be successful again, Katherine.

Fuck that.

If there was anything worse than having a dad who was a teacher, it was having your dad at the same school as you. And not just for a couple of years. A K-12 school. A small K-12 school, so you had thirteen years of absolute hell, no breathing space, no room to be yourself. And if that wasn't bad enough, have your dad be best friends with the headmistress for a gajillion years--Ann Zedman always over at your house, peeking into your life.

That was why Katherine loved the East Bay. It was hers.

At least, it had been until last week--the stupid cops separating her out, scolding her, asking what the hell she was doing with those people. She remembered the ride home from the Oakland police station, her wrists raw from the handcuffs, her anger building as her father glanced in the rearview mirror, insisting that she not tell her mother what she'd been doing at the party because it would break her mother's heart. Katherine had snapped. She'd told her dad everything--to hurt him, to prove it was even worse than he thought. She did have a life of her own. Friends of her own.

Oh, Daddy.

She hated herself even more than she hated him. She'd told him. She'd ruined everything. Now he would send her away to goddamn Texas.

Mallory tugged at her sleeve. "Come on, Kaferine. You got a double red."

Katherine looked across the game board.

Mallory had been her dress-up doll, her pretend child, her toy self she could slip into whenever real life sucked too bad. But now that Mallory had started kindergarten at Laurel Heights, Katherine felt sad every time she looked at her. She never wanted to see them ruin this little girl, the way they'd ruined her. She never wanted to see Mallory grow up.

She forced a smile, moved her double red.

Mallory drew Queen Frostine and squealed with delight.

It was an easy skip from Queen Frostine to King Kandy. Mallory won the game while Katherine was still back in the Molasses Swamp.

"What can we play now?" Mallory asked. "Horses?"

"I have a better idea."

"No," Mallory said immediately. "I don't like that."

"Come on. It's our little secret."

"It's scary."

"Nah. For a brave kid like you?"

Katherine went to the secret panel in the wainscoting, the storage closet that her grandfather had constructed when the bottom level of the townhouse had been his shop. He was a clockmaker, her grandfather. He loved gears and springs, mechanical tricks.

The door was impossible to see from the outside. You had to press in just the right spot for the pressure latch to release. Inside, the space was big enough for a child to crawl into, or maybe an adult, if you scrunched. The back was still crammed with clock parts--copper coils, weights and chains, star-and-moon clock faces.

She remembered her grandfather telling her, "Never wind a clock backwards, Katie. Never." He had always called her Katie, never Katherine. Her father said it was because he couldn't bear to think of his wife, whose smoker's lungs had shut down while she was waiting for her namesake to be born. "Winding backwards will ruin the clock. Always go forward. Even if you only want to go back an hour, always go forward eleven."

She wondered if her dad had been made out of clock parts, like the latch on the cabinet. She wished she could wind him backwards one week, to see if something would break.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Chadwick's life was balanced on a knife's edge - his career, his marriage, his relationship with his dangerously troubled daughter. And then one autumn night, the worst possible thing happened..." "Now, a decade later, Chadwick's heart is on the mend. Working for an old military buddy, he saves kids for a living, escorting troubled teens to a Texas wilderness school that specializes in the toughest brand of love." "Until he gets a phone call that threatens to shatter his new life." "Mallory Zedman is taking the same terrible path Chadwick's own daughter once took. Defiant and out of control, Mallory is determined to destroy herself and anyone who tries to stop her. No sooner does Chadwick snatch her off the streets than he discovers she is wanted for questioning in a brutal murder - a slaying that seems directly linked to Chadwick's past." To save Mallory, tough love will not be enough. Chadwick must find the truth behind the murder - and in doing so revisit the infidelities, shattered promises, and violent passions that cracked his world apart. And he must jeopardize the one thing he still has left to lose - a slim hope of redemption.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Riordan is a middle-school teacher in San Antonio, which explains why this unorthodox suspense novel-Riordan's first break from his Edgar-, Shamus- and Anthony-winning series about private detective Tres Navarre (The Devil Went Down to Austin, etc.)-centers around two very different kinds of schools. One is Laurel Heights, a private middle school in San Francisco, where a dedicated staff deals with the needs of the privileged children of the affluent. The other is Cold Springs, a survival school in the mountain country of Texas, where a former army Ranger rescues teenagers who have slipped over the edge. Linking the two schools is Chadwick, a huge man who looks like George Washington; he teaches history at Laurel Heights and then becomes an escort at Cold Springs (run by his old Vietnam buddy) when his own teenaged daughter, Katherine, dies of a drug overdose. Chadwick, who blames himself for Katherine's death (he was about to leave his wife for Ann Zedman, the woman who runs Laurel Heights), is a complex and interesting character, and the pressures on him are believable and absorbing-especially when Ann's daughter, Mallory, becomes a Cold Springs candidate. Riordan tilts the playing field by introducing a truly dysfunctional family, the Montroses, and tracing a string of murders related to Katherine's death. Knife-throwing, wild shooting and hairbreadth escapes up the ante, sometimes to the point of overkill, but Riordan is so good at moving his story along-and showing how fragile children's lives can be-that most readers will forgive him his excesses. (May 6) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Cold Springs is an east Texas wilderness boarding school for troubled teens. Haunted by his own unresolved guilt over his daughter's death from a heroin overdose nine years earlier, ex-teacher Chadwick now makes his living escorting children into this boot camp for losers, giving them a second chance whether they want it or not. When an ex-lover asks him to locate her self-destructive 15-year-old daughter and take her to Cold Springs, Chadwick finds himself involved in a case of blackmail, murder, and financial skullduggery. Strong characters, tense situations, and vivid action sequences make this book hard to put down. And Riordan's description of the school's rehabilitation program will prove fascinating to anyone who has had to deal with a rebellious teen. This is not part of Riordan's multiple-award-winning "Tres Navarre" series (The Devil Went Down to Austin), but it is an essential purchase for all public libraries.-Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews