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Out of the blue Jack Fletcher, a former hot-shot surf photographer now surviving on hack work, cheap beer and muscle relaxants, gets a call from the surfing magazine he worked for back in his glory days. Assigned to photograph Drew Harmon surfing the remote reef known as'Heart Attacks', the photographer can't quite believe his luck: both the surfer and the wave are the stuff of legend, and mean a ticket back into the big time.With two young surf punks in tow, Fletcher heads off for the grim wilderness of Northern California, and the Indian territory where Harmon now lives with his half-mad wife Kendra, who roams the woods at night wearing the clothes of a murdered girl. This is not what Jack had expected, and things get worse.To reach the fabled Heart Attacks and ride the winter waves Harmon, Fletcher and the punks must cross the tract of blasted headland known to the local Hupa, Yurok and Tolowan Indians as'The Devil's Hoof'. When a child dies in an accident, the white men are blamed; the Indians, swearing vengeance, kidnap and brutalise Kendra, then set off to kill the surfers.In this desolate wasteland the search for the perfect wave becomes a quest for survival, as events lead inevitably to their final, tragic climax.

Heart Attacks is California's last secret spot - the premier mysto surf haunt, the stuff of rumor and legend. The rumors say you must cross Indian land to get there. They tell of hostile locals and shark-infested waters where waves in excess of thirty feet break a mile from shore. For down-and-out photographer Jack Fletcher, the chance to shoot these waves in the company of surfing legend Drew Harmon offers the promise of new beginnings. But Drew is not alone in the northern reaches of the state. His young wife, Kendra, lives there with him. Obsessed with the unsolved murder of a local girl, Kendra has embarked upon a quest of her own, a search for truth - however dark that truth may prove to be.In this desolate wasteland the search for the perfect wave becomes a quest for survival, as events lead inevitably to their final, tragic climax. 'Nunn has fashioned a darkly layered tale of people who are desperate to make their lives whole again... [His] twisting plot and cliffhanger chapter endings carry the same cadences as an Elmore Leonard detective story. Nunn's strength as a writer comes out in his mood-setting descriptions of the rural North Coast, where, like the weather, the locals' behavior can be fickle to the extreme. With all the evil lurking out there in the dim light of the redwoods and frigid swells of the North Coast, The Dogs of Winter qualifies as a surfing Gothic' - San Diego Union-Tribune'If Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy had teamed up to write a surf novel, they might have produced The Dogs of Winter... Nunn does a masterful job of driving this... potboiler to its climax... By the time the sea foam clears, Nunn has added a modern-day adventure sport to the long list of literary confrontations between man and nature-a very twentieth-century version of a struggle once played out in tales of pioneering, exploration, and the harpooning of great white whale' - The Village Voice'Nunn has given us a book that anyone interested in the existential problems and terrors of modern life will want to read... Nunn is a fine writer who knows just the right tricks for fusing physical action with mental turmoil. He also knows how to make a good plot, and he creates a number of credible and fascinating characters out of contemporary California culture' - Chicago Tribune