Writer, Steve Hamilton

I love Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight series which started off with the excellent, A Cold Day in Paradise in 2000. The mysteries are all set in Michigan’s wintery, freezing Upper Peninsula. Alex McKnight embraces a lot of the typical tropes of this genre: he left the police force due to a bad bust that resulted in his partner being killed. Plus the bullet that struck Alex is still lodged near his heart. Now he’s a PI, working solo on the odd case now and again.

The mysteries are not that overly complex and there’s some light humor inter-weaved throughout to lighten things up a bit. I enjoy this series because I enjoy angst, people with flaws and a good old murder mystery to cap it all off. Another strength is that he’s really good at creating atmosphere and his settings are pretty well-developed. I keep going back to check the release date for his long-awaited entry in this series, Misery Bay. It releases on June 7th so not that far away and there’s some good buzz on it already which means absolutely nothing. Lawrence Block’s A Drop of the Hard Stuff had good early buzz but I couldn’t even finish that one. All the books in the Alex McKnight series are digitized and the total books in the series comes to about 8 books. Reading list below the synopsis and after the break for those interested.

ALEX MCKNIGHT IS BACK in the long-awaited return of one of crime fiction’s most critically acclaimed series.

On a frozen January night, a young man loops one end of a long rope over the branch of a tree. The other end he ties around his neck. A snowmobiler will find him thirty-six hours later, his lifeless eyes staring out at the endless cold water of Lake Superior. It happens in a lonely corner of the Upper Peninsula, in a place they call Misery Bay.
Alex McKnight does not know this young man, and he won’t even hear about the suicide until another cold night, two months later and 250 miles away, when the door to the Glasgow Inn opens and the last person Alex would ever expect to see comes walking in to ask for his help.
What seems like a simple quest to find a few answers will turn into a nightmare of sudden violence and bloody revenge, and a race against time to catch a ruthless killer. McKnight knows all about evil, of course, having faced down a madman who killed his partner and left a bullet next to his heart. Mobsters, drug dealers, hit men—he’s seen them all, and they’ve taken away almost everything he’s ever loved. But none of them could have ever prepared him for the darkness he’s about to face.