Steve Hamilton - A Stolen Season (2006)
Reviewed by Yvette Banek
A classic wooden Chris-Craft boat speeds out of the cold, foggy night and crash lands in the middle of Alex McKnight’s life. An improbability that immediately lets us know the laconic ex-cop is in for a very rough ride. This is author Hamilton’s seventh installment in the Edgar and Shamus award-winning series set in the icy never-land of northern Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A cold, windswept, heart-of-darkness place where few things are ever as they seem.
"Twenty four hours.
Six. Feet. Of Snow.
Most years it doesn't even melt until May. Then we might get a quick flash of spring.
The temperature might break forty and we're practically lying on the beach in our bathing suits. That's how desperate we are for a little sunshine. The snow will sneak back a few times and dump a few more inches in the middle of the night. Just teasing us. Then finally the earth will tilt position and the summer will seem to come all at once. The old joke, how summer was on a Thursday last year. That's how brief it seems. How fleeting.But God, what a summer it is. For one blink of an eye, this becomes the most beautiful place in the world. There's a light up here. You have to see it to know it. The way it hits the water in the evenings. The way the wind comes off the lake and you can look all the way down a long straight road and see the trees moving one by one.
The sunsets.
The desolate, heartbreaking beauty of this goddamned place. This home of mine. But not this year. For whatever reason, we're skipping summer altogether. We're rushing right back into those fall months when the lake turns into a monster. Almost overnight, six-foot waves ready to batter the great ships again. To miss out on the promise of summer is the cruelest thing imaginable, and everyone, every last person living here, has been feeling it."
"Had I but known," is writ large over a powerhouse first chapter made the more poignant as we later know, by McKnight's heroic actions on that night. When we look back and understand just how certain events were set in motion, we understandably mourn his lack of prescience. In A Stolen Season, Alex McKnight is almost undone by the mere fact that he is capable of mercy. This is both his saving grace and paradoxically, his failure. In many ways, this has always been McKnight's Achilles' heel and it is more apparent than ever in the events foreshadowed by the reckless intrusion of a speeding boat. Followed as it is by the rescue from the wreckage of three surly men.
"From the beginning, everything about that night was wrong.
Everything."
Unsettled by loneliness, a restless McKnight is once more on his own. Natalie Reynaud, the woman he loves, is five hundred miles away in Toronto, working a dangerous undercover assignment for the Canadian police. McKnight is a man under no illusions that life owes him any happiness, but unused to worrying, he broods over events that have left him feeling uneasy and more isolated than ever. He senses what is coming but is powerless to do anything to stop it.
So the stage is set for Alex and Natalie and Leon and Vinnie and Jackie, McKnight's small coterie of friends who inhabit what is, despite the setting, a rather intimate and even fragile world. Especially so when Vinnie, helping out a friend, as usual, takes on the guise of avenging angel in pursuit of prescription drug smugglers who have infiltrated the Ojibway Indian reservation. It is then up to Alex to save Vinnie from himself. But who will save Alex McKnight?
Steve Hamilton writes atmosphere as well as, if not better than, any writer working today. In fact, atmosphere can almost be said to exist as another "character" in all his stories. It is that palpable. In A Stolen Season, the bleak atmosphere drips with menace. Couple this with the aching loneliness at the heart of this book and it is easy enough to see that Hamilton is going for something grander and more mysterious than a thrill ride.
There's much in this book that could have been sentimentalized and might still have worked, though not as well. Steve Hamilton is talented enough and caring enough not to go that route. By allowing us entry into McKnight's unsparing, instantaneous thoughts at the moment of tragedy when he is in the most danger of losing his soul, we are instantly pulled into his grief.
Steve Hamilton is at the point where a smart publisher should start grooming him for super-stardom. This is a guy, who, strictly speaking to his talent, is on the brink of something too important to ignore. A writer with something worth saying and a real talent with which to say it.
There are pages in this book that are staggering in their intensity. Hamilton has a deep understanding of how seductive isolation can be, how it can work its insidious magic inside a receptive soul. This is something that Alex McKnight constantly struggles against.
Steve Hamilton's work reminds you of the reason why you began reading fiction in the first place.
Posted by Yvette Banek in Book Reviews | Permalink
