Hunter's Dance

By Kathleen Hills

Autumn in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula means hunting season, and the fall of 1950 finds most everyone in St. Adele township hunting for something—deer, grouse, uranium; love, redemption, escape; a story, a husband, a murderer.
When the son of summer residents at the exclusive Shawanok Club is found dead after an uproarious dance at the town hall, the sheriff is flummoxed, and everyone is appalled: Bambi was found in the loft over the tool shed, bound, gagged, and inexpertly scalped. Who better to search for the killer than St. Adele’s reluctant constable, John McIntire?
The trail he must follow branches off like the spokes of a wheel, leading to multiple dead ends. The only common link seems to be the boy’s parents: a father who is mysteriously unavailable, a mother, on a mission to see her son’s killer dead, who remains sequestered in her rented mansion, baking cream pies and playing the piano. Her imported private eye seems more interested in dallying with McIntire’s exotic Aunt Siobhan, who’s turned up on his doorstep some 25 years after she ran off with a carnival worker as a teen. And Bambi’s mentor on a summer’s search for uranium, a hot prospect in Flambeau County, is more conversant with archaeological artifacts than Geiger counters.
McIntire’s investigation takes him from the haunts of the affluent visitors, to the backwoods camp of a Rube Goldberg hermit, and finally to an abandoned gold mine where he learns what really happened that autumn night....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Release date: May 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781615950966

Kathleen Hills

Kathleen Hills spent the first forty years of her life in rural Minnesota before leaving for the real world and a career in speech and language pathology. After determining that ten years in the real world should be all that is demanded of anyone, she turned to writing. She is the author of Past Imperfect, Hunter’s Dance, and Witch Cradle, mysteries set in 1950s Michigan featuring John McIntire, township constable. Kathleen divides her time between northern Minnesota and Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Reviews for Hunter's Dance

[bookish59 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Couldn't get into it but that was probably my fault not Hills'.