Frozen Voices

Book excerpt: Fiction. In her debut novel, FROZEN VOICES, Lynne Heinzmann has performed magic beyond even the skills of Harry Houdini, one of her most delightful characters. Heinzmann pulls off an astonishing feat of literary legerdemain, resurrecting real people who, in February 1907, were passengers on the steamship Larchmont, a vessel which sank off the coast of Rhode Island, taking 137 souls down with her: 'drowned, frozen, or scalded to death.' In giving voice and vitality to a group of these passengers, Heinzmann combines meticulous historical research with a humane and generous imagination. Readers will live and breathe with the four narrators of the novel, as we see them before, during and--for some--after the disaster. FROZEN VOICES weaves the characters and events aboard this doomed ship into a complex and spellbinding tale. In the end, readers are left with exactly the reactions that should follow such an act of wondrous conjuration: we are amazed and deeply touched. --Hollis Seamon