A Stolen Season

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From Publishers WeeklyThe chill of Michigan's Upper Peninsula doesn't cool the action in Edgar-winner Hamilton's expertly paced seventh Alex McKnight novel (after 2005's Ice Run). On an unusually frigid Fourth of July night, the retired Detroit cop and his sometime partner, Leon Prudell, save three men from a boating accident in Lake Superior's Waishkey Bay. But the men return to accuse their rescuers of stealing a locked box off the boat, and Alex discovers that they're squeezing members of the Bay Mills Indian reservation for government-financed prescription painkillers. As Alex closes in on the dealers, he narrowly avoids death. Meanwhile, his long-distance girlfriend, Ontario police officer Natalie Reynaud, goes undercover in Toronto to ferret out an illegal arms dealer. When she pays Alex a surprise visit at his Paradise, Mich., cabin, their operations intersect with tragic results. Plot turnarounds and double-crosses ensure a startling conclusion. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistHamilton, who received the Edgar Award for his first mystery, A Cold Day in Paradise (1999), is now on his seventh installment in the series starring private eye Alex McKnight, who works as a cabin curator and sometimes private eye in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. McKnight has a familiar backstory for a private eye: he is a one-time cop with a troubled past (in McKnight's case, the trauma of having his partner killed). Hamilton, however, uses McKnight's break from his former life as a way of exploring his character's efforts to escape despair and find some semblance of meaning. He found at least some of that meaning in the last adventure, Ice Run (2004), in the form of a tentative love affair with a female cop. This time the action shuttles between McKnight's attempts to stop a prescription pain-killer drug ring in Paradise, Michigan, and his girlfriend's assignment to Toronto as an undercover gun dealer. Hamilton's gamble of putting the most exciting action offstage with the girlfriend pays off big-time here. Hair-raising suspense with poignant characterization. Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved