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'Ice Cold' is the eighth in my 'Rizzoli and Isles' thriller series. It was inspired by a true occurrence in the 1960s, now known as the 'Dugway Incident,' in which 6,000 sheep mysteriously died overnight in a remote area of Utah. I thought, 'What if it happened instead to people? What if the inhabitants of an entire village vanished overnight?'

Great numbers of the Indians pass our camp on their hunting excursions: the day was clear and pleasant, but last night was very cold and there was a white frost.

What happened in Snowtown was repeated many times in history, in a big scale and a small scale.

I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

When I came there I found all my family gone, for the Indians had killed five people in the winter near that place, which frightened my wife and family away to Roanoke about 35 miles nearer in among the inhabitants, which I was informed of by an old man I met near the place.

When I was four or five, my father had a general store in Winchester and I don't think the farmers could ever leave on Saturday afternoon until I had been placed up on the counter to sing.

I had a birthday one night on a farm we were shooting on. I walked into the tent, and there were 150 people waiting for me, all wearing masks of my face.

I spent a lot of winters in my childhood flying kites with my brother, with my cousins, with friends in the neighborhood. It's what we did in the winter. Schools close down. There was not much to do.

The weather became so intensely cold that we sent for all the hunters who had remained out with captain Clarke's party, and they returned in the evening several of them frostbitten.