STEVE HAMILTON – North of Nowhere.

St. Martin’s; paperback reprint; 1st printing, May 2003. Hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 2002.

   When I went to undergraduate school in Michigan’s famed upper peninsula, there was a popular song (and maybe a movie) called “North to Alaska.” Our version was turned around and became “South to Alaska.” (Maybe you had to be there.)

   Anyway, this is the fourth of former Detroit policeman Alex McKnight’s recorded cases, the first of which, A Cold Day in Paradise, won an Edgar. There’s a town in the lower portion of the state called Hell, down around Ann Arbor, and I’ve been there, and I’ve been to Paradise, where this story takes place, up around Sault Ste. Marie, and more in the middle of nothing but trees, trees and more trees, it is hard to imagine.

   Well, there is the Lake Superior shoreline, and nearby Tahquamenon Falls. Could the area be the site of the next building boom, for rich down-staters to build multi-room faux-Victorian summer mansions along the lake?

   Alex gets involved when a poker party he’s invited to at the last minute is interrupted by gunmen who seem to know how much money the wealthy host (and would-be developer) has in his hidden upstairs safe.

   The tale as it develops from there is too long (322 pages) and too talky to be truly hard-boiled, but Hamilton has the knack of pulling the reader into his story with prose as smooth as you hope to live for and yet so seething with underlying tension that it sometimes hurts. McKnight also has a wonderfully uncool and all-but-inept private eye buddy whose loyalty is questioned but comes back answered.

   This is a guy’s book — the only women that show up are three or four wives, some faithful and some not. There’s also just enough honest-to-goodness detective work going on to add an extra dimension to a rip-roaring northern woods adventure novel that’s sheer all-out fun to boot.