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NORTH OF NOWHERE
by Steve Hamilton
Minotaur Books, May 2002
259 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312268971


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Alex McKnight, an ex policeman and ex private investigator, is celebrating his 49th summer doing exactly the way he wants to do. He¼s hibernating from his friends, from himself, and from the world. He makes his living renting out his vacation cabins to tourists who visit Paradise, Michigan, which is located north of nowhere. Alex¼s father built the very last cabin all by himself and that is all Alex has to remind him of his dad.

Jackie Connery, owner of the nearby Glascow Inn is Alex¼s best friend and Jackie is sick and tired of the way Alex has been acting the last few months. Jackie goes to Alex¼s cabin and makes him an offer: either leave Paradise and go up north to Moosehide and hibernate there or go with Jackie to a poker game.

Alex is in no mood for poker but he doesn¼t feel like taking the next plane up north and knowing that Jackie can force him onto that plane decides to take the lesser of two evils. How bad can a night of poker with his friends be anyway? Very!

Jackie explains that the game is being held at Winston Vargas¼ home. It¼s a big house about an hour away from Paradise looking over beautiful Lake Superior with a view of Canada on the other side. Win has made a fortune selling big ticket household appliances.

Win and Alex have never met before. Win, a big, bald headed man who¼s best friend seems to be his mean, little, nasty Chihuahua, Miata, takes Alex on a guided tour of his home showing off his American Native „artifacts¾ and all the other things he¼s bought, both legally and illegally.

Some of Alex¼s and Jackie¼s other friends are there to play poker too: Gill LaMarche an American Indian, Bennett O¼Dell who owns a bar named O¼Dell¼s, and Kenny who works for Vargas.

During the course of the poker game Alex learns that Win thinks his wife is having an affair with their usual sixth poker player, a lawyer named Swanson, and that Win has hired a private investigator to prove it. The private investigator is Alex¼s ex partner, Leon Prudell.

When the game is well underway the house is suddenly broken into by three men wearing hospital surgeon gowns. The poker players are told to get on the floor while Win is taken upstairs. Alex doesn¼t know what the two robbers who are downstairs look like but he notices that one of them is very light skinned and blonde and the other is bigger with ripped, torn sneakers, thanks to Miata.

There is a lot of glass breaking and screaming going on upstairs. Eventually the three robbers leave not hurting anyone and Alex goes to see what happened to Win on the upper floor.

All of Win¼s „artifacts¾ were thrown out the window. Some of them are on the ground and others are floating on Lake Superior. Win¼s hidden safe was also broken into and his money stolen.

The next day after the poker players were questioned by the police, Win calls Alex and tells him that he suspects that Alex and the other poker players arranged for the robbery because no one else knew about the hidden safe. Even though Alex had only met Vargas that one time, Win suspects Alex to be a part of the group.

This is the start of Alex McKnight¼s nightmare. Not only doesn¼t he have the money that was stolen and knows nothing about it but the robbers think that the poker players are holding out on them and wants more money. Alex takes it upon himself to prove his innocence and the innocence of his friends to not only Vargas and the robbers but to the police who suspect the poker players as well.

This is the fourth in the series with Alex McKnight and his life on the Upper Peninsula. Steve Hamilton writes great prose and describes the area as someone who truly loves it.

NORTH OF NOWHERE is a fast paced book with wonderful characters who seem to cling to each other because of their lives and the way that life treats them in this rural part of Michigan.

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, May 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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