To Whom It May Concern

Book Review: Ice Run by Steve Hamilton

Oddly enough I just picked this book up in the MWR building one night when we first got to Iraq, before we had internet set up in our hooches, and I got into it while reading it for about a half hour waiting to use a computer, sitting in the makeshift library they have here at Tallil.

The main character of the book is an ‘on again off again’ detective, Alex McKnight, who runs a snowmobile/camping cabin resort type of place, like a hideaway, way up north along the border with Canada in Paradise, Michigan. There is a river that basically makes up the border line.

McKnight is the main character in a series of books from this author. McKnight gets drawn into suspenseful mysteries more by sheer dumb luck than any determination to actually do detective work. As the story goes along, he falls in love, gets his ass beat a number of times, and of course by the end of the book he solves the puzzle. Hamilton’s description of the cold winter scenery is excellent, you can almost feel the chill in the air from the blustery Michigan wind as you read the book.

Even in the cold eerie dark setting, you want to be there, going to the old hotel, riding in the small plane to the old mysterious island in the center of some lake, I guess that’s part of the intrigue of mysteries such as this, and the suspense that goes with them.

Rating: ***