Scott Phillips: The Ice Harvest

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Wichita, Kansas, Christmas Eve 1979. Charlie Arglist has 9 1/2 hours to get out of town. In Wichita he's practically a celebrity: a lawyer turned strip club owner.

A lot of people love Charlie. Mostly because they're paid to. His ex-wife and her parents loathe him. His kids hardly know him. He pays for sex, pays to keep the cops off his back.

And he's involved in a rip-off of the big boss which should pay off big time. If he can just get out of town in time. Nine and a half hours in real time, and counting.

Set mostly in the small hours of Christmas morning when the kids are waking up in the hope of catching Santa, and Mr and Mrs Middle America are dreaming of a row-free Christmas, Charlie is trying to say goodbye to his bleak, nasty little world inhabited with small-town losers, big-time drunks and girls whose name nobody remembers in the morning.

The Ice Harvest was first published in 2000; it's well worth seeking out this reprint if you missed it then.

It's as sharp and nasty as an ice pick in the heart. But that sound you hear as the point goes in is yourself laughing at Phillips' finely honed sense of the ridiculous.

Picador

$27.95