Winter of the Wolf Moon - Softcover

Hamilton, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752844814 ISBN 13: 9780752844817

Publisher: Orion, 2002

Synopsis

It's winter in Paradise, a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on the frozen borders of Canada. After ploughing the new snow from his drive every morning, Alex McKnight is content to stay warm in front of the fireplace at the Glasgow Inn with a bottle of his favourite Canadian beer. Once a catcher in the minor leagues, later a Detroit police officer, Alex gave the private eye business a try and it ended up being the 'second worst' mistake of his life. So when a young native American woman of the Ojibwa tribe comes to him for help, Alex is reluctant to become involved. Nor does he want anything to do with goofy Leon Prudell, who wants to get back in the PI business and has fixed on Alex as his partner. But before you can say 'storm warning', events have spun out of Alex's control. Soon he'll have to deal with an entire team of drug-crazed hockey goons, two mysterious men wearing guns and hunting caps, and a cold-blooded killer from the other side of the world. Perhaps Alex needs that new partner after all ...

About this title

Review

Snow doesn't just fall on cedars on Michigan's Upper Peninsula: it coats everything, mobile and inanimate, in a treacherously quick, dangerously thick blanket of white. As Alex McKnight observes, gazing out the window of his cabin in Paradise, "It looked like about six inches of new snow. Around here, that qualifies as scattered flurries." Given this climate, the urge to hibernate is perfectly understandable--batten down the hatches, throw another log on the fire, and wait until the spring thaw. For Alex, the denning impulse is as much psychological as it is physical. Haunted by memories of his deadly failures as a cop, a private investigator, and a lover, Alex wants nothing more than to plow his driveway, be cordial to the snowmobilers who rent his cabins, and lower his core emotional temperature to the forgetting point. Unfortunately, he's got friends who get in the way of his seasonal plans.

When Vinnie LeBlanc, an Ojibwa Indian, convinces Alex to fill in as goalie for his hockey team, slap shots and hard checks are soon the least of his worries. Instead, he becomes embroiled in a tangle of conflicting allegiances; one of his opponents, Lonnie Bruckman, a bigot and a psychotic, is terrorizing the Ojibwa reservation in ways both personal and professional: he abuses his girlfriend, Dorothy Parrish, and sells "wild cat," a methamphetamine derivative, to members of the reservation. Dorothy--desperate to escape her Ojibwa heritage but reluctantly acknowledging its force--turns up on Alex's front door with a mysterious canvas bag and a plea for shelter: "'The wolf moon means it's time to protect the people around you because there are wolves outside your door.'" But the next day, she's gone.

As Alex, devastated by his inability to protect Dorothy, tries to find her, he must confront Bruckman--for whom a snowmobile is less a recreational vehicle than an instrument of torture; a mysterious Russian named Molinov; the combined forces of the local police and the DEA; and, it seems, even those he has always considered friends. Luckily for Alex, Leon Prudell, "a two-hundred-forty-pound whirlwind of flannel and snowboots," who really, really wants to be a private investigator, is right there to lend a hand. Leon adds a welcome note of comic relief to the novel (as does, to be sure, Alex's own dryly sardonic wit), but the book's tone is largely elegiac: "It was the middle of the day, but with the sun hidden behind the clouds and the weight of snow in the air, there was an oddly muted light, dim yet persistent, as each snowflake seemed to glow with its own energy. I stopped for a moment ... hypnotized by the sight of it and by the sound of my own breathing." Surviving winter takes many kinds of courage, and the reader will be enthralled by Alex's efforts to disprove Molinov's ominous warning, "'Once you freeze all the way through to your soul, you will never feel warm again. You'll see.'"

Steve Hamilton won the 1999 Edgar Award for his first Alex McKnight mystery, A Cold Day in Paradise, and Winter of the Wolf Moon will reassure readers that neither beginner's luck nor sophomore jinx troubles this author. --Kelly Flynn

About the Author

Born and raised in the Detroit area, Steve Hamilton lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children. He is a winner of the prestigious EDGAR AWARD. Visit his website: www.authorstevehamilton.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0752844814
• ISBN 13: 9780752844817
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320