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From the
Chicago Tribune,
October 26, 2003
A
bear claw at Christmas
By Dick Adler
There
are many pleasures on display in this excellent new mystery by Henry
Kisor, book editor and literary columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times:
characters who leap from the page and lodge instantly in your mind, a
plot that manages to be outrageous and logical at the same time, a
brisk and pungent writing style that suits the story perfectly. But
it's the sharply evocative sense of place that will probably grip
readers hardest and hold them longest.
Even if you're a determined urbanite who has never been any closer to
Michigan's Upper Peninsula than the pages of a guidebook, how could you
resist being seduced by Kisor's description of the revival of  once-blighted
Porcupine
County?:
"Second-growth forest was restoring the countryside to much
of
its
original wildness. Except for the vast fields of tailings north of Lone
Pine Mine, the wounds the copper mines had carved in the woods--now the
Ottawa National Forest--had largely been hidden by scrub, brush, and
young aspen and birch. The wildlife had roared back to the point where
some species, like whitetail deer and black bear, had become nuisances."
Steve Martinez, a deputy sheriff descended from Lakota Indians (a term
he prefers to "Native Americans") and adopted by a Hispanic family,
answered a Porcupine County employment ad from his upstate New York
home and immediately fell in love with the area. He had some early
difficulty fitting into the closed community because of his name and
appearance, but that has largely passed. Now, in late fall, with the
holiday season looming, his daily routine of drunks and traffic tickets
is made more interesting by what turns out to be murder by bear.
A leading citizen, Paul Passoja, one of the area's founding Finnish
fathers, has been found in his tent, mauled to death by a bear. Bacon
grease spilled from the elderly man's supper probably attracted the
hungry animal. But enough little things bother the meticulous Martinez
that he begins his own investigation, helped by a local historian with
whom he starts a satisfyingly slow and believable relationship. Even if
Passoja had early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, was he far gone
enough to be so careless with his food? Did the man's many ruthless
land transactions have anything to do with his death?
Answers--and more questions--slide by in a most natural manner, and by
the time Christmas rolls around, the sly solution seems a part of the
total landscape.
Copyright 2003 Chicago Tribune |
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