In December of 1907, on the Manitoba border, a boy killed his friend with a hatchet for a hundred dollars.

Arthur LeClair, an eighteen-year-old fireman on the Great Northern, came home to Neche, North Dakota, with fourteen months of hard-earned wages in his pocket—one hundred dollars for his parents on Christmas Day. By morning, he was under the ice of the Pembina River.

When the town threatens to lynch two innocent suspects, the state's attorney calls in a Pinkerton detective to untangle the truth.

Drawing from contemporary newspapers and case files, A Murder for Christmas tells the story of a brutal Pembina County winter in plain American prose: of the Métis families along the river, a boy under the ice, the friend who killed him, and the witness in the willows who saw it all.

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