Allen Eskens is a mystery writer (and a Minnesota writer at that) with whom I hadn’t been familiar. But based on my reading of The Deep Dark Descending, I’m impressed with his work.

Max Rupert is a Minneapolis police detective, still mourning the death of his wife Jenni, who was killed by a car in a parking garage a few years ago. His sorrow has colored his life through the previous books in this series, but now it all comes to a head. He learns, in the course of one of his investigations, that Jenni’s death was a targeted hit. He’d always assumed she’d been collateral damage from one of his own cases, killed by some vengeful criminal to hurt him. But in fact someone very powerful and ruthless killed her for the sake of something she’d learned in her job as a social worker.

The book opens on a winter day in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, on the Canadian border. Max captures a man and ties him up, then forces him out onto a frozen lake. Methodically he begins boring with an auger, with the purpose of creating a hole large enough to drown a man.

In counterpoint with the scenes on the lake, we follow in flashbacks the course of Max’s investigation, as he follows information learned in a human trafficking case, slowly realizing that the man he’s chasing is the man who also killed his wife. All his life he’s been a man of the law, but the law can’t touch this killer. Could he live with himself if he were to take the law into his own hands? Could he live with himself if he didn’t?

That question is ever present in The Deep Dark Descending, and it will keep the reader riveted from start to finish, as it did for me. I’m not sure what I think about the final resolution, but there’s no question it was dramatic.

The writing was good – not outstanding, but very good. I might just read the earlier books in this series, based on this memorable novel. Cautions for the usual.