February 1, 2021 Post # 63

Quote for the Day: "...the Great Lakes have a voracious appetite for ships and sailors."  Jack Parker. Shipwrecks of Lake Huron. 1986.

Book Reviews

 Meet Isabel Puddles  by M.V. Byrne

Isabel Puddles is a middle-aged widow living in the little resort village of Gull Harbor, Michigan on the east coast of Lake Michigan somewhere north of Holland. She makes financial ends meet by being a superhuman multi-tasker. Izy, as her many friends call her, cans and sells gourmet pickles, bakes pies for local restaurants, sells antiques at an antique mall, has a waiting list for scarfs she knits, and occasionally does make-up, and hairdressing for the local undertaker. 

It is the last job that literally lands Isabel well over her head in deep and dangerous waters. It is her uncomfortable job to prepare the body of an old friend for viewing, who supposedly died of a stroke. When she discovers a nail buried in the head of the deceased death by natural causes turns to murder. She notifies the sheriff but Izy comes to believe the lawman arrested an innocent man for the murder.  Through keen observation, gathering odds and ends of pertinent information by asking questions of her many friends in the village, and uncovering new evidence Izy comes to a different conclusion as to why and who killed her friend.  Of course, her friend the sheriff discounts her suspicions. In trying to prove her friend innocent Izy puts herself on a collision course with the murderer.

Izabell Puddles is a marvelous character and so is Gull  Harbor and its residents. The book is elevated well above the ordinary by its often charming and almost always amusing depiction of life in a small lakeside tourist village that hums with activity in the summer when it is overrun with self-important and wealthy tourists and sleepy winters when the tourists and their money have retreated to Farmington Hills, Chicago, Grosse Point and various other enclaves of the well to do. The novel is rich with sharp-eyed asides including nearly every aspect of life in Gull Harbor including the subdued and prayerful competition between the Methodist and Congregationalist churches.

The book is a joy to read and the cover states it is the first in a new series. I can't wait to be in the company of Izy and her friends once more.

Meet Isabel Puddles by M.V, Byrne. Kensington Books, 2020, $15.95.

Northern Nightmare by Tom Mohrbach

This is the first true Northwoods Noir book I've run across. Even before opening it, I had doubts as to whether I wanted to read a book that depicted my beloved northern Michigan as a dark, violent region where psychopaths turned the woods red long before the fall color season. Then I read one of the great opening lines of any dark thriller or hard-boiled mystery I've ever encountered. You can't read it without being drawn into this haunting and violent hunting trip near Mio that goes terribly and deadly wrong.

The four Mitchell brothers have made it a family tradition to return to Michigan from around the country every year for a trip up north where they spend a week together in a deer camp hunting with bow and arrows. The brothers come from different walks of life and have personalities that often cause conflict when the four are sequestered in a remote hunting camp. But they are ill-prepared to deal with another family of brothers living near their deer camp.

The four local brothers are all sociopaths with their fingers in a number of illegal enterprises. They all have anger issues that act as wicks that once lit explode into murderous violence. They are pure unadulterated evil. The two sets of brothers cross paths several times and each encounter heightens the tension between the two families and there is no doubt that at some point an encounter is going to turn deadly. If that is not enough dread and foreboding the brothers may have had a run-in with a mythical local creature called the Michigan dog-man. You can Google the name.

The last forty pages are expertly choreographed by the author and are driven by deadly mayhem in a relentless narrative that moves like a runaway semi hauling nitroglycerin. Gripping is not a forceful enough description of this reading experience. 

Northern Nightmare by Tom Mohrbach. Self-published, 2020, $9.99.

Beyond Beyond by Joseph Heywood

The author has built a large readership by creating two popular series of books featuring the adventures of a present-day Conservation Officer in the U.P. and another chronicling the exploits of Lute Bapcat a Conservation Officer set during the copper boom in the Keweenaw Peninsula. This present offering from Heywood is the third in the series featuring Lute Bapcat and sets him on an extraordinary adventure.

Lute is recruited by his former commander of the Rough Riders, yes Teddy Roosevelt, to go to Russia in 1917 and locate Lute's friend and former Conservation Officer Pinkus Zakov. It seems Pinkus went to Russia nearly a year earlier to find the tsar and his family. Zakov has disappeared and, of course, so have the Romanovs. Lute and his newly adopted son, who can speak Russian, are recruited because he, "knows how to find people," and living in the Keweenaw knows, "how to live in impossible conditions." If this sounds rather improbable the plot edges even closer to beyond belief when a mysterious U. S. Marine Corp officer with near-magical powers to influence Russian officials is put in charge of Lute and his son and Lute is ordered to pretend to be mute and act as the officer's attack dog.   

But the improbable plot elements are soon forgotten and buried under Heywood's compelling, colorful, and convincing portrait of a country in tatters. The trio finds themselves in the midst of the Russian Revolution which puts them in constant danger. Adding to the chaos is the arrival of American troops, many from Michigan, sent to guard the vast amount of foreign supplies sent to a now non-existent Russian army and with the hopeless mission of stabilizing an out-of-control situation. And then you have the unstoppable spread of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic sweeping across the country. The result is a great adventure.

Beyond Beyond: A Lute Bapcat Mystery by Joseph Heywood. Lyons Press, 2020, $27.95.

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