Ice Run: An Alex McKnight Novel by Steve Hamilton

This is my third Hamilton novel and my second in the Alex McKnight series. It is a follow-up to the last McKnight, Blood Is the Sky. It has the same characters: McKnight, damaged hero, former Detroit cop, and former PI who’s in mid existential crisis and trying to figure out what to do with his life; Jackie, the owner of the local pub; Vinnie LeBlanc, an Ojibwa Indian who has moved off the reservation; and Leon Prudell, McKnight’s former PI partner. All alone in the woods of Michigan’s UP (as in Upper Peninsula), McKnight decides to learn more about Natalie Reynaud, the detective that he encountered in Canada during the last novel. She is in her own life crisis (too young to be mid-life) with regard to the events from Blood in the Sky as well as her own very dysfunctional family of origin. She managed to keep her rage about having been sexually abused by playing high school and college hockey, usually against the boys, and the sex scenes in this book sometimes sound like a vigorous rugby scrum. She has relationship problems, so the match with McKnight is explosive. The story develops from McKnight’s and Reynaud’s decision to have a tryst in Sault Ste. Marie which leads to their chance encounter with a man, Simon Grant, who knew one of their families and who leaves a mysterious clue about that before he dies in a deep winter snow and then has his body cut in two by a snow plow. Nice picture, eh?! The story takes us back to the murder of a Reynaud's father during the Prohibition Era when there was a lot of organized crime action smuggling booze across the Canadian border. Hamilton does a good job with the narrative and character development. It is a good plot with good twists that I did not always see coming. This was not a great book, but I’ll continue to read Hamilton. At minimum, this is a good “airplane book,” and when Hamilton is at his best, like with Lock Artist, he’s very entertaining.

West Coast Don