Dragons of Winter Night

Journal of the Dead recounts the story behind one of the most bizarre murder cases of recent times. Raffi Kodikian and David Coughlin were best friends in their mid-20s. Together, in the summer of 1999, they took a holiday together, starting out from Boston where they lived, and driving across America all the way to California. They never made their final destination. En route, they stopped off in New Mexico to spend a night camping in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, sited on the Chihuahuan Desert - a terrain so hostile that New Mexico's Spanish founders referred to it as 'el jornado del muerte' - the journey of the dead. The place they chose to camp that night was called, inauspiciously, Rattlesnake Canyon. They awoke the next morning and prepared to leave. But it wasn't that simple. In temperatures of 110 degrees F, they struggled repeatedly to find the route they'd come in by. Their water supplies were inadequate. For three days they tried and failed to find a way out. On day four, the men decided help wasn't coming. Severely dehydrated, and near death, Coughlin asked his friend to kill him. Kodikian obliged, putting a knife through his heart. That, at least, was Kodikian's version of events when park rangers finally found him a few hours later. But this version was challenged, first by the rangers who found him and then by police as he became the subject of a murder enquiry. Did Kodikian kill Coughlin out of compassion? Or did he have a more sinister reason for ending the life of his closest friend? Kersten looks at all the evidence, including the views of the protagonists and those who knew Kodikian and Coughlin. It's an extraordinary, gripping story and Kersten brings a degree of tension and suspense to the tale worthy of any crime novel. Unlike a crime novel, however, this one doesn't have a neat ending and we may never know what really happened between the two men in Rattlesnake Canyon. Read it - and make your own mind up. (Kirkus UK)