Blood Is the Sky (Alex Mcknight)

Hamilton, Steve

4.14

4,023 ratings by Goodreads

9781469203256: Blood Is the Sky (Alex Mcknight)

ISBN 10: 1469203251 ISBN 13: 9781469203256

Publisher: Brilliance Audio, 2012

When a fire is done, what’s left is only half-destroyed. It is charred and brittle. It is obscene. There is nothing so ugly in all the world as what a fire leaves behind, covered in ashes and smoke and a smell you’ll think about every day for the rest of your life.Reluctant investigator Alex McKnight finds himself drawn by friendship into a long drive north. The brother of Alex’s longtime Ojibwa friend Vinnie LeBlanc works as a hunting guide, serving the rich clients from downstate. It seems that Vinnie’s brother and his most recent group of hunters have vanished in northern Ontario, and Vinnie is scared enough to ask Alex to help him find them.Their arrival sets in motion a heart-pounding string of events that leaves Alex and his friend miles from civilization, stranded in the heart of the Canadian wilderness with no food, no weapons -and no way out. And there’s someone out there who definitely does not want them to make it back alive.At once elegant and enormously suspenseful, Steve Hamilton’s Blood Is the Sky heralds his arrival as one of the premier crime writers working today.

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Review:

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.com

Review:

Michigan, October. Alex McKnight is rebuilding one of his cabins with friend Vinnie LeBlanc when LeBlanc is called to an emergency - his brother, Tom, has not returned from hunting and is four days overdue. Alex and Vinnie decide to retrace the hunt party's steps, travelling as far as the Ontario roads will allow. When they arrive at the outpost they are told that the hunters have already left to return to Michigan. But something's wrong. Vinnie and Alex - aided by a Cree Indian and his grandfather - fly to the outpost, only to find a terrible secret. Alex and Vinnie are miles from home with no food or equipment - and someone doesn't want them to get home alive. Superb visualisation of Canadian countryside with original characterisations make this one to watch.

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