When a professor's wife is found drowned in an icy river, rumours of murder are rife within the walls of Atherton University. But then an older mystery emerges from the shadows as people recall the discovery of a corpse in a frozen creek some twenty years earlier and wonder whether the two might possibly be connected.Three friends find themselves snared in a web of lies surrounding the murders: for each of them college had promised a bright future and a way to disconnect from a dark, haunted past, but - as winter sets in - their secret histories threaten to reveal themselves in nightmarish fashion.

Snowbound on the university campus, Kathryn, Randall and Jesse are the unwitting captives of a malevolent force that drives them relentlessly toward the 'snow garden' of the title - a place of horrors that is all too real . . . and all too near.

Christopher Rice has written an unforgettable and powerful thriller that probes the terrible weight of the past on the present and the frighteningly corrosive nature of secrets. A novel not to be missed . . .