He’s waiting for Dorothy, his fiancée, and tonight is the last night they’ll be meeting here, for it’s May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she’s late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident—an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year—always on May 31st—wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe.

    Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until finally there is nowhere to go.Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.

    In the crowded train car she meets happy newlyweds Patrice Hazzard, also expecting, and Hugh. They are on their way to visit Hugh’s parents, whom Patrice is meeting for the first time. After Patrice hands Helen her wedding band so she can wash her hands in the rest room, the train crashes, killing the Hazzards, but Helen survives. When she regains consciousness in the hospital, she discovers she has been mistaken for Patrice. Patrice’s wealthy in-laws send for Helen, and she decides for the sake of her son to go along with the misunderstanding. They welcome her into the fold and her “brother-in-law” Bill even shows signs of romantic interest. But when her husband tracks her down and threatens her with blackmail, her dream turns into a nightmare.

    Al Colby, an American expatriate working as a private investigator in Mexico City, is contacted by an old acquaintance in Los Angeles who hands him a cold case involving a missing person. Robert Parker’s mysterious disappearance is tying up a family fortune and is enraging his abandoned wife who can’t tap the family coffers without proof of death. The case sounded routine enough, right up his alley, but the trail for the missing Mr. Parker leads Colby down a rabbit hole winding through a number of South American countries, each one a dead end. Running out of funds and clean shirts, Colby is ready to throw in the towel, but the stakes are too high and his client fuels the search with additional cash. The deeper Colby digs the more entangled he becomes in a decades old mystery of misplaced loyalties, family secrets and riches in nitrate ore. In between tequila shots and beautiful women, Al Colby has a case that drags him in deeper with each step.  But can he piece it all together before the quicksand swallows him whole?