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In a sequel to J. Kathleen Cheney's award finalist, Iron Shoes, Snow Come to Hawk's Folly picks up a few years after the first left off: Guiare and Imogen have married and have had a child. And her devious fairy father, Mr. Finnegan, has shown up on her doorstep, wanting to get to know his long-lost daughter. Finnegan promises not to harm any of her family -- a promise he cannot break. But Imogen is unsure if her father can still do damage, playing with the wording of the promise.

Soon after, several crises arise at once: a maid is having a baby, the nurse-maid has disappeared, and so has their son, Patrick. While Guiare and Finnegan find a small predator's tracks in the snow and follow in the form of horses, Imogen and Mother Hawkes search for the nurse maid and investigate the magic man in Albany who had helped Hammersley in the first story.

This long story does not rest on its speculative laurels but rather plays and pushes its speculative conceit as we learn more about fairies: things the stop them, and things that help them move through the world in new ways. Moreover, like a good mystery, this story does a good job feinting and playing with reader expectations of whom the kidnapper is.

Again, this entertaining novella and the other of Imogen and Guiare trials are well worth a gander. If you read old-fashioned hard copies, you'll have to order the original publications (Alembical 2 and Panverse 2) or petition a publisher to pick this up.

Trent Walters teaches science; lives in Honduras; edited poetry at Abyss & Apex; blogs science, SF, education, and literature, etc. at APB; co-instigated Mundane SF (with Geoff Ryman and Julian Todd) culminating in an issue for Interzone; studied SF writing with dozens of major writers and and editors in the field; and has published works in Daily Cabal, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy, Hadley Rille anthologies, LCRW, among others.