Blood is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (An Alex McKnight Novel Book 5)

Before Blood is the Sky, the Alex McKnight series had already hit bestseller lists and won awards, but this novel took it to a whole new level. Set in the forests of northern Ontario, a land of savage beauty and sudden danger, Blood Is the Sky shows why Steve Hamilton is one of the most acclaimed crime novelists writing today. Alex McKnight isn't a man with many friends, but the few he has know they're never alone in a fix. So when Vinnie LeBlanc asks for his help in taking a trip deep into Canada in search of his missing brother, he knows he can count on Alex. His brother had taken a job as a hunting guide for a rough crew of Detroit "businessmen." The group was due back days ago, yet there's been no sign of them, and there's mounting evidence of something odd about their disappearing act. The trackless forests of northern Ontario keep many secrets, but none more shocking than the one that Alex is about to uncover. And the more closely Alex looks for answers, the more questions there become. 'When a fire is done, what's left is only half-destroyed. It is charred and brittle. It is obscene. There is nothing so ugly in all the world as what a fire leaves behind, covered in ashes and smoke and a smell you'll think about every day for the rest of your life.' Steve Hamilton is one of crime fiction's rising stars. His first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, won the Edgar Award, and each successive novel has met with widespread critical acclaim. Now Hamilton raises the stakes dramatically in his most accomplished work to date. Reluctant investigator Alex McKnight finds himself drawn by friendship into a long drive north. The brother of Alex's longtime Ojibwa friend Vinnie LeBlanc works as a hunting guide, serving the rich clients from downstate. It seems that Vinnie's brother and his most recent group of hunters have vanished in northern Ontario, and Vinnie is scared enough to ask Alex to help him find them. Their arrival sets in motion a heart-pounding string of events that leaves Alex and his friend miles from civilization, stranded in the heart of the Canadian wilderness with no food, no weapons--and no way out. And there's someone out there who definitely does not want them to make it back alive. At once elegant and enormously suspenseful, Steve Hamilton's Blood Is the Sky heralds his arrival as one of the premier crime writers working today Compelled by an old friend to investigate the disappearance of a hunting group in the woods of northern Ontario, reluctant investigator Alex McKnight finds himself deep in the wilderness, lacking food and weapons and at the mercy of a killer who could prevent everyone's return