Title: Foresaken Country
Author: Allen Eskens
Year published: 2022
Category: Adult fiction (mystery)
Pages: 352 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2024 Google Reading map): USA (MN)
Summary: Max Rupert has left his position as a Minneapolis homicide detective to live in solitude. Mourning the tragic death of his wife, he's also racked by guilt—he alone knows what happened to her killer. But then the former local sheriff, Lyle Voight, arrives with a desperate plea: Lyle’s daughter Sandy and his six-year-old grandson Pip have disappeared. Lyle’s certain Sandy's ex-husband Reed is behind it, but the new sheriff is refusing to investigate.
When Max reluctantly looks into their disappearance, he too becomes convinced something has gone very wrong. But the closer Max and Lyle get to finding proof, the more slippery Reed becomes, until he makes a break for the beautiful but formidable Boundary Waters wilderness with vulnerable Pip in tow.
Racing after the most dangerous kind of criminal—a desperate father—and with the ghosts of their own pasts never far behind, Max and Lyle go on the hunt within a treacherous landscape, determined to bring an evil man to justice, and to bring a terrified child home alive.
Review: So I've managed to start with #6 in this series and I didn't realize that until I looked up the summary to write this review. Hmmmm. Would that mean I had no idea what was going on? I hope not.
It turns out that a few months into the pandemic I read Nothing more Dangerous by Allen Eskens (link to my review), which I liked even though I was in a real pandemic-induced reading slump. Here we are three and a half years later and I did much better with this one.
This novel pulled me in right from the beginning. It is tense (as it always is when a small child is involved), well written, and I really liked that we saw the progression of the story from both the perspectives of the "good" and "bad" guys. I think it made it more tense. A friend told me that Hitchcock referred to this as suspense (rather than surprise).
And suspenseful this novel is! I stayed up late to finish it last night and have no regrets.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Literary Escapes--Minnesota
- Cloak and Dagger
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