Set on the campus of a prestigious northeastern university during the last few days before Christmas break, "Snow Garden" opens with the death of a young student frozen in a creek near campus. Like the author's first novel, "A Density of Souls, " this gothic thriller focuses on a tightly knit group of young people, but here the murder mystery is deeper and more threatening. Unabridged.

Born in San Francisco and raised in New Orleans from the age of ten, Christopher Rice published four New York Times bestsellers, received a Lambda Literary Award, and was declared one of People Magazine's Sexiest Men Alive, all by the age of thirty. His debut novel, A Density of Souls, was greeted with a landslide of media attention, much of it an offshoot of his mother's fame as a legendary vampire chronicler. His supernatural thriller The Heavens Rise was a Bram Stoker Award nominee. The InsightOut Book Club selected his book Blind Fall as a best novel of 2008. In addition, his noir thriller Light Before Day was hailed as a "book of the year" by Lee Child. He has served as a contributing columnist to The Advocate and has been published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon.com. His short fiction has been featured in the anthologies Thriller and Los Angeles Noir.