Tracking the Beast
Tracking the Beast
by Henry Kisor
Five Star • ISBN: 978-1-4328-3115-8 • $25.95 Hardcover
Mystery writer Henry Kisor takes a comfortable ease with the small-town lifestyle and necessities of his fictional Porcupine County, Michigan. It’s a familiarity well investigated since he and his wife divide their year between a home in Evanston, Illinois, and a log cabin in Ontonagon County by the Big Lake.
This police procedural, as the genre is called, is the fifth following an unlikely Upper Peninsula sheriff, Steve Martinez, a transplanted Oglala Lakota man who also fits naturally into his adopted North Woods home. In this book, at least, his cultural heritage is not much in evidence despite the first-person narration.
The mystery here revolves around the murders of young girls, whose bodies – along with some adults’ – are hidden in railcars sidelined for long periods in a U.P. holding area. The first body is discovered in Omaha, after the car is re-employed.
The action follows the details of the investigation. The murders are not local, but the killer, as we and the sheriff discover, is a train nerd.
Henry’s writing is clean and straightforward, as expected from a Pulitzer finalist for book criticism. For Big Lake lovers, the long-distance tracking of the murderer around Lake Superior introduces an engaging trek with the sheriff citing what are, no doubt, some of Henry’s favorite Circle Tour locations.
You can enjoy this book without reading the others, but you likely will want to spend more time in the U.P. with the good sheriff.
Let's Go Fishing
Let’s Go Fishing: Fish Tales from the North Woods
by Eric Dregni
University of Minnesota Press • ISBN: 978-0-8166-9321-4 • $39.95 Hardcover
Who wouda thunk that a book tracing the culture, literature and history of angling could be so much fun? This delightful coffee-table book weaves in keeper quotes from the times of Cleopatra (yes, the queen has a good fish tale to tell) to modern writers and presidents. Sprinkled with fishing trivia and entertaining old photos, postcards, posters and even some actual facts, every page brings something worth landing and likely worth retelling.
Our northern region gets plenty of ink in this book. Eric addresses commercial fishing on Lake Superior with many intriguing old photos, like the 1915-era one at Samuel L. Goldish’s Lake Superior Fish Company. There’s the Friday fish fries and fish boils, of course, but also Walker’s eelpout festival, Duluth’s Great Lakes Aquarium, Tofte’s North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum and Hayward’s Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame.
This book is a great catch that, like any good fish story, you’ll want to share. You might want to save reading it until those dark days of winter when the boat is covered and the fishing rods put away when you need to dream of angling … unless, of course, you are an ice fisherperson, too.