Narrated by young Jamie O'Day, who is beginning to understand that, like his daddy says, "every story is about sex or death, or sometimes both,"The Winter Helen Dropped Byis a story of growing up, of loss, of laughter and of characters both sexy and dead.

Helen is the young, pregnant Indian woman who drops into Jamie's life one freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey snow-storming night. It is her haunting presence, woven throughout Jamie's accounts of the spring he damn near drowned, the summer of the peculiar reconstituted wedding of Mrs.Beatrice Ann Stevenson and Mr.Earl J. Rasmussen, followed by the summer White Chaps murdered his wife, that makes this a funny, sad and wholly wonderful new novel.