Only the Dead

August 18, 2014
Like the central movement of a dark Grieg symphony, this brief second installment of Norwegian author Sundstøl’s Minnesota Trilogy resounds with two stunning variations on a single theme: the complex motivations behind murders that link brotherhood, love, and death. In the first book, 2013’s The Land of Dreams, forest ranger Lance Hansen, an insecure amateur historian, and his brother, Andy, set out on their annual November deer hunt on the North Shore of Lake Superior. When Lance checked out a report of an illegally pitched tent near the lake, he discovered the battered body of a Norwegian tourist. Shortly beforehand, Lance saw Andy near the crime scene. Now, as Lance’s relationship with his brother frays, he is consumed by a maelstrom of suspicion and fear that parallels Sundstøl’s eerie interpolated recollections of Lance’s distant relative, the pietistic Lutheran immigrant boy Thormod Olson, on a harrowing winter trek in search of the American dream more than a century earlier. As an ice storm builds around him, Lance’s emotional stability is shattered by the waking nightmares of a ghostly Ojibwe medicine man who mysteriously vanished from the same forest years earlier. Readers will eagerly await The Ravens, the trilogy’s conclusion.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
A police officer and his brother play cat and mouse in a frozen forest. Lance Hansen is still haunted by his last case, a Norwegian tourist found murdered on the shores of Lake Superior (The Land of Dreams, 2013, etc.). Although an Ojibwe man has been arrested, Hansen can't shake his fear that his brother, Andy, is the murderer. Now they're out in the woods together on their annual deer hunt, and Hansen's mind wanders to the murder and to the fact that he's now unable to dream; he recalls dreams from the past and his childhood with a difficult father. Andy accuses Hansen of breaking into his cottage, and the tension between them escalates to the point that Hansen feels Andy may be planning to kill him. Generations ago, their ancestor Thormod Olson may have killed an Ojibwe, Swamper Caribou, in the same area as the recent murder. The story of Thormod's desperate struggles alone in a frozen wilderness and how he came to kill Swamper Caribou is told against the background of the present-day deer hunt occurring amid similar circumstances. Although their suspicions and fear of each other harden, Hansen and his brother continue their hunt, carefully keeping track of each other even as Hansen seems to be suspended in a dream world where the past and present merge. The second in the Minnesota Trilogy, this slim volume is so exquisitely written, lyrically descriptive and mystically mysterious it could stand on its own, but to understand all the nuances it's best read as part of the trilogy.

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