Cold Truth

Harlow Close has built a career out of other people's secrets. A Winnipeg influencer who exposes scams, frauds, and the strange underside of her famously frozen city, she trades in the gap between what people project and what is actually true. Then, during a brutal cold snap, her own father vanishes — a man who has already once been the target of a romance scammer — and Harlow's professional cynicism collides with genuine fear.

Unconvinced by the police response, Harlow ropes in her reluctant sister Blaise and starts investigating on her own, following a trail that leads through online deceptions, family resentments, and the buried histories of the people closest to her. The deeper she digs, the harder it becomes to tell performance from reality, and the more she is forced to reckon with the uncomfortable truths she has been avoiding about her father, her sister, and herself.

Ashley Kalagian Blunt's Cold Truth is a sharp, contemporary crime thriller wired into the age of influencers and online fraud. Atmospheric in its wintry Winnipeg setting and propulsive in its plotting, it uses a missing-person mystery to probe authenticity, deception, and the stories families tell to hold themselves together.