Kitty Sewell"s Ice Trap starts with a bombshell. Dafydd Woodruff, who"s desperately been trying to conceive a child with his wife, receives a letter: "Dear Doctor Woodruff, I hope you don"t mind me writing to you. I think I"m your daughter..." Suddenly, a relatively innocent past takes over his present life, and that of his wife. It further develops that there isn"t just a daughter; this purported "daughter" is actually one of twins, a girl and a boy. Deep in the remote, sub-arctic wilderness where Dafydd had worked 15 years earlier, these children were conceived and born to a woman for whom he felt little but animosity. She was--and still is at the time the novel takes place--head nurse in the hospital where Dafydd did a locum. He was running away from a tragic medical accident, and this distant area seemed like a good place to escape to. DNA tests are ordered immediately to clear Dafydd in his wife"s eyes. The tests are positive, the marriage is very precarious, and Dafydd goes back to the Canadian wilderness to sort things out. What he finds there is complex and compelling. The surprises are not set-ups but develop organically, making the story believable. This is the extremely self-assured debut of a writer to watch. She has deftly created landscape, character, mood and suspense to bring her story to its snapper of a conclusion. --Valerie Ryan