Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (Alex McKnight Mysteries) Book

One of the most promising secondary figures in Steve Hamilton's series about reluctant northern Michigan private investigator Alex McKnight has been his teetotal Ojibwa Indian pal, Vinnie LeBlanc. Vinnie mostly kept himself to himself in the first four McKnight adventures but Blood Is the Sky finally lets him loose, and it's both pleasurable and painful to see what results. Vinnie's younger ex-con brother Tom has disappeared. In violation of his parole, Tom had guided a small contingent of moose hunters into the pacific forests of Ontario, but none of them had returned home on schedule. To assuage Vinnie's worries, McKnight agrees to drive with him into Canada and look for the men. No luck: the owners of a money-losing lakeside lodge where those sportsmen had stayed say they departed days ago. So where did they go? Who were the two other, unidentified guys who came looking for them in advance of McKnight and his friend? And why was the hunters' vehicle abandoned, with their wallets inside, near an Indian reservation? Looking for answers, the detective and Vinnie set off into the woods, where hungry bears are by no means the most dangerous creatures they'll have to face. Despite its Deliverance-like moments, and an explosively violent conclusion that's not sufficiently foreshadowed, Blood Is the Sky is really a gracefully composed study of character, as focused on Vinnie's strengths and failings as Hamilton's previous novel, North of Nowhere, was on the story of another series regular, bar owner Jackie Connery. Yet McKnight shines here, too, his self-effacing humour keeping readers amused, when they aren't amazed--again--by the lengths to which this supposedly lonerish sleuth will go to help a friend in trouble. --J. Kingston Pierce, Amazon.comRead More