Winter of Frozen Dreams
By: Karl Harter / Narrated By: Dennis Holland
Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
From start to finish? Entertaining if you liked “48 Hours” and Court TV
Almost immediately, I was struck by the tones of Dennis Holland. He kinda sorta has a distant feel to his voice, kinda an emotional detachment. Soon, however, as I came to understand how author Karl Harter’s story was unfolding, I started appreciating Holland’s voice and approach. After all, Winter of Frozen Dreams starts playing out like the True Life crime drama “48 Hours” that was aired on A&E, then later morphs into the courtroom drama that was aired aaaaaallll the time on Court TV (Man, when I first started working overnights, I’d fold laundry whilst watching the sanity hearings for Geoffrey Dahmer; I loooooved Court TV!!!).
It opens in riDICulously freezing Madison, Wisconsin on Christmas morning 1977. A freaked out, fumbling, and overly wrought Jerry Davies stumbles into a police precinct, glasses drooping from his nose, and he’s wailing about how he helped bury a dead man in a snowbank. The officer groans about one of those nutcases who confess to oddities all the time, but sure enough, THIS time? The overwrought Davies ain’t kidding. A naked corpse is found, frozen arm sticking outta a pile o’ snow, with severe trauma, and his, uhm, nether regions are bloated (Which I’m phrasing in a nice way, something Harter does NOT do…).
Davies soon spews everything he knows about what happened, and a young woman, Barbara Hoffman, is brought in.
She’s an Enigma Extraordinaire from Beginning to Epilogue, lemme tell ya.
The story then follows a MASSIVE amount of details, so MANY details, a veritable itty bitty Blow-by-Blow of avenues of investigation taken, lines of questioning, searches made, ideas springing to light only to be snuffed out as wrong. Each person involved in the case is described, along with how long-suffering their spouses and children are. And gosh! could this get boring, or what?! I mean, one peripheral character baaaaarely involved in the case is described watching her TV, a fly buzzing in her kitchen, a dude coming in after driving his taxi for work, he has beer and wants a quick shag, and she picks some oatmeal outta her teeth.
I mean, right?! That’s a LOT to jot down as basic manuscript which somehow made it through the editing process.
Character development? Local color?
I dunno, but ANYhoo! Winter of Frozen Dreams is a detail-stickler’s dream come true. And I was fascinated as, while no lover of pedantry, I do soooo love a blow-by-blow investigation, esPECially when it involves the more unseemly aspects of life. Barbara Hoffman, just thiiiiiis close from graduating with something like a degree in Bio-Chemistry (I think that’s what it was…), drops out and starts working in a massage parlor. This once staid and undramatic young woman suddenly has noooo problem with various aspects of the job (Ouch, dude! NO pun intended… Criminy!), and she develops a clientele based upon the fact that NOTHING fazes her. A weepy man needs to be punished? No problem: A dozen lashes plus two for good measure even after the safe word to stop was uttered.
Her clientele was devoted to her, which all morphs into murder for the insurance money. Two men, homely and unworldly and with boring and uneventful lives, found passion with her, excitement: Enough to want to marry her; enough to make her the beneficiaries of huuuuuge life insurances.
Well, THOSE were ill-considered decisions, and they left the two men dead. And it’s onto the court case with more blow-by-blow, word-for-word accounts of the flamboyant defense lawyer, and the stern and tenacious prosecutors.
See? This reeeeeally COULD get pretty boring and tedious. But I truly like stuff like that, so for me it was no problem.
My only problem? Within the narrative, all is going detail professional detail professional -THEN- InCREDibly graphic depiction of sexual acts. YIKES! Somehow, it didn’t make m’ toes curl like they do when I accidentally wander into a “steamy” romance, but it DID sorta shock me outta my haze of entertainment, leave me wondering why Harter felt necessary to suddenly leave form and go for the in-your-face (AGAIN: NO PUN INTENDED!!!) vulgar. But p’raps he was just attempting to give the reader a sense of Madison’s seedy underbelly, of lives lived comPLETEly off the radar and NOT according to normal rules of polite society.
All in all, an entertaining little listen, if you’re into this kinda stuff (And good cow! I was once Queen O’ True Crime Bios). Don’t, however, expect to EVER gain any insight about murderess Hoffman. Nope, she remained ever-silent.
Like I said? Dude! Enigma Extraordinaire… Baffling…
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