When a snowboarder and a skier end up decapitated up in the snow-capped mountains, and Nick Craven, one of Special X's best Mounties, is bizarrely murdered in a hotel room, all flags turn red—blood-red.

It's December 2009 and the town of Whistler, B.C., is hosting the Olympic trials in advance of the 2010 Winter Games. The place—an idyllic, remote mountain village—is rapidly filling with egotistical athletes, hangers-on, media folks, golddiggers, corporate sponsorship people, and the curious. And a megalomaniacal psychotic killer known as Mephisto has come with his army of Icemen to disrupt and destroy with a diabolical revenge plan (and the means) to kill 90% of the world's population. It's a little like Agatha Christie meets Alistair MacLean, but the resulting body count would have shocked both authors.

Head of security for the games is Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq of Special X, the Special External Division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Mounties. In the past, DeClercq barely survived a couple encounters with the madman Mephisto. Unfortunately, Mephisto's elaborate new plan includes assassinating everyone connected to Robert who can ID him. The snow really does run red in Whistler as Mephisto's ingenious, horrifying Dr. Phibes-like killing gadgets begin to take their toll. Before the end of the "Going for the Gold" event at the El Dorado Resort, Robert will have lost friends and loved ones and face the annihilation of billions of innocent people. As Mephisto's mercenaries isolate the already remote village by all too easily cutting off roads and power during a raging snowstorm, the terrorist plot will be set into motion.

Michael Slade, currently the team of Jay Clarke and daughter Rebecca (Headhunter, Ghoul, Bed of Nails, Swastika, Kamikaze), has made an industry of spinning tales with wildly disparate tidbits of historical information and research and turning them into taught, unpredictable thrillers pitting Special X Mounties against some of the most despicable characters ever created. RED SNOW, while in heft a much breezier, quicker-moving version of these thrillers, delivers a high body count, tons of entertaining deadly scrapes for characters to get into and, only occasionally, out of, and a setting that's eerily familiar to anyone watching the Winter Games—in fact, there's just about nothing stranger than reading Red Snow during the Olympic Games, imagining the implications of an actual terrorist attack. (Indeed, this is why I ordered the Canadian edition and made room in my schedule to read it while the Games were still in progress.) Only an insider who knows the ins and outs of the mountain resort could have used the setting so effectively in so few pages. As befitting the history of the Mounties, there's a Wild West quality to the action that could seem comic-bookish but mostly doesn't (except perhaps for the curious tendency to spell out gunshots: Bwam!). As for the cast, be prepared—for no one is safe.

As usual, the arcane knowledge and asides referred to in the novel are part of the attraction, leading readers from Alpine sports to the conquistadors' search for El Dorado and the procedure for shrinking human heads, for instance. Given the "going for the gold" anthem of the Games, all the golden references (including allusions to Goldfinger, natch) seem livelier given Slade's patented sardonic narrative voice. Though skimping on background and deep motivation, Slade still manages to link this new chapter of the Special X canon to previous outings, avoiding weighing it down with long, grafted-on info dumps—rather a feat in itself, considering the large cast of recurring characters and their complex connections. And to help make this short-but-sharp thriller truly thrilling, the authors serve up a full helping of that  evil "Slade-of-hand" misdirection. Following previous tradition, there is a bibliography at the rear to help you "read more about it," as it were, in case some of those unusual references to bizarre historical events pique your interest. Penguin has given the trade paperback a distinctive white cover with just the right dash of red (blood, of course).

Red Snow may not quite stand up to some of the more intricate, serpentine earlier Special X novels, but its single-minded brevity may be considered a virtue if the ease with which one can describe it as a "page-turner" is any indication. Bwam! Call it another bullseye for Michael Slade.