"The Dogs of Winter is a sharply focused story about good and evil....There is a lot going on in this supercharged tale of...crankster gangsters and sneaker waves, shape-shifters and great whites. There is witchcraft, insanity, savagery, and in the end, a peace that may indeed surpass understanding....Like the novel's legendary surfer, who builds extra-long redwood 'guns' to ride the big waves of the Pacific Northwest, Nunn has fashioned his own gun -- a plot sturdy enough to carry a fair amount of intellectual cargo a long way toward shore....Nunn has a keen ear for the jabber of lowlifes and nincompoops. His riffs on the argot can be wickedly funny."
-- Frank Clifford, Los Angeles Times Magazine

"Novelist Kem Nunn is the most accomplished practitioner of California noir writing today, the principal heir to the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West....The Dogs of Winter...is Nunn's best novel yet....There's probably not an American novelist working today who is better at choreographing and describing physical action, and few who so capably combine thrills with clear-eyed and compassionate characterizations."
-- James Hynes, The Washington Post Book World

"No one writing in America today writes better about the surf than Kem Nunn."
-- Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

"Nunn's churning prose picks you up like a thirty-foot wave and gives you one helluva ride to the beach....[The Dogs of Winter] is the greatest novel ever written about surfing."
-- Peter Plagens, Newsweek

"Remarkable. A serious, richly satisfying novel."
-- Steve Friedman, GQ