Book
The Case of
The Icebound Witness
Series: Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket
Published July 24, 2026
On the coldest morning of the year, a man who walks in his sleep is found in the snow with no memory of the night — and the sheath of the ice pick that killed his brother frozen into his hand.
Cleveland, January 1979. A blizzard is shutting the turnpikes on the near-anniversary of the storm that closed the city a year before — the same night Gordon Albright rose in his sleep, stood over his wife with an ice pick, and sent her running to a cottage on Lake Erie and a lawyer's office to file for divorce. That decree is hours from final when Albright gathers the last people who can stop it under one roof: a partner demanding a ruinous buyout of the plant, an estranged wife who has thrown in with him, and the quiet stepbrother who keeps the company's books.
By dawn the boiler is dead, the drifts are to the sills, and Ted Mercer lies stabbed through the heart in a bed that was not his, the brass ice pick from the library bar left in the wound. Gordon Albright is found wandering the frozen grounds, hypothermic and unable to account for a single hour of the night. Homicide Captain Marcus Thorne makes the arrest. County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads the file — a documented history of sleepwalking violence, a marriage worth killing to keep, eight blank hours — and prosecutes it straight, because the file is airtight.
Gordon's secretary calls Vance Sterling. The State's case rests on a witness who swears to what he saw and heard the night of the murder, an alibi propped on a long-exposure photograph and a single telephone call. Sterling believes every word of it — except one, and that one is impossible. To keep a man who cannot testify for himself out of prison for the rest of his life, he will have to prove it with what the analog world left lying in plain sight: a freighter's position logs, two coin-phone toll tickets, and a photograph that holds one detail too many.
The Case of the Icebound Witness is the second case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.
Cleveland, January 1979. A blizzard is shutting the turnpikes on the near-anniversary of the storm that closed the city a year before — the same night Gordon Albright rose in his sleep, stood over his wife with an ice pick, and sent her running to a cottage on Lake Erie and a lawyer's office to file for divorce. That decree is hours from final when Albright gathers the last people who can stop it under one roof: a partner demanding a ruinous buyout of the plant, an estranged wife who has thrown in with him, and the quiet stepbrother who keeps the company's books.
By dawn the boiler is dead, the drifts are to the sills, and Ted Mercer lies stabbed through the heart in a bed that was not his, the brass ice pick from the library bar left in the wound. Gordon Albright is found wandering the frozen grounds, hypothermic and unable to account for a single hour of the night. Homicide Captain Marcus Thorne makes the arrest. County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads the file — a documented history of sleepwalking violence, a marriage worth killing to keep, eight blank hours — and prosecutes it straight, because the file is airtight.
Gordon's secretary calls Vance Sterling. The State's case rests on a witness who swears to what he saw and heard the night of the murder, an alibi propped on a long-exposure photograph and a single telephone call. Sterling believes every word of it — except one, and that one is impossible. To keep a man who cannot testify for himself out of prison for the rest of his life, he will have to prove it with what the analog world left lying in plain sight: a freighter's position logs, two coin-phone toll tickets, and a photograph that holds one detail too many.
The Case of the Icebound Witness is the second case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.