Hang Fire

May 1, 2013
Implacable Sheriff Steve Martinez (Cache of Corpses, 2007, etc.) investigates a series of musket murders. Go figure. Upper Michigan's Porcupine County hopes to lift its flagging economy with some Revolutionary War re-enactments targeted at summer tourists. The county board has urged Desert Storm-vet Sheriff Martinez, a Lakota Indian raised by a white family, to make sure things run smoothly with the re-enactors. Many of them, known as the Mountain Men, camp out together near the performance site and take method acting to an extreme level, living in character even when there's no audience around. When teacher Gloria Lake, who portrayed a seamstress in the re-enactments, succumbs to a fatal musket shot just below the rib cage, Martinez's role becomes more official. At first, Gloria's colleagues close ranks, offering Martinez no helpful information. After stonewalling in an initial interview, however, her good friend and fellow teacher Sheila Bodey admits that Gloria had also worked among the Mountain Men as a prostitute. Although Martinez's ladylove Ginny Fitzgerald reasonably explains how Gloria's death was most likely an accident, a judgment that becomes the official ruling, his gut tells him it's murder. Over the succeeding months, several more deaths by musket cast a cloud of suspicion over the original verdict and raise Martinez's hackles. Once murder is a given, the pieces of the puzzle fall, one by one, into place. A confident and engaging whodunit. Kisor's prose is as refreshingly clean and balanced as the hero's investigative style.

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March 1, 2013
Porcupine County in Michigan's Upper Peninsula is glad to have Revolutionary War reenactors for a week. Any outside money in the economically depressed area can't hurt. But when one of the participants is killed by a shot from an antique muzzle-loader, Sheriff Steve Martinez and his already undermanned staff are obligated to investigate. They conclude that the death was a tragic accident. On the other hand, it turns out that the dead woman's camp persona was prostitute, and she had numerous customers in the camp. Over the next few months, Martinez notices a number of accidental deaths involving antique muzzle-loaders in the Upper Midwest. Martinez's law-enforcement instincts aren't amenable to coincidence, so he begins his own investigation, quickly discovering that he is both hunter and prey. This is the fourth Steve Martinez mystery from Kisor, former books editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. His series mines the same territory as Bill Crider's small-town crime series featuring Dan Rhodes, who, like Martinez, is a thoroughly engaging protagonist. In both series, personal rivalries, quirky personalities, and big-fish/small-pond distractions form a fascinating undercarriage for cleverly built mysteries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)