I hate it when I encounter a writer who’s good in himself, and even gracious in his attitudes, but still feel obligated to turn from his work for ideological reasons. So let’s get it out of the way at the beginning. Henry Kisor is a fine writer, and Season’s Revenge is a pretty good rural mystery. My reason for stopping after the first book in his Steve Martinez series is that I’m an ideologue, and I prefer to stay away from books written from certain points of view. To the extent that you find my attitude narrow-minded, you are likely to like Kisor’s books. In that case, I heartily recommend them to you.

Steve Martinez is a sheriff’s deputy in fictional Porcupine County, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In spite of his name, he’s Lakota Sioux by heritage, and was raised by white evangelical Christians, who died while he was young. He ended up in Porcupine County, with which he had no previous ties, more or less by chance. In other words, he feels somewhat disconnected in the world.

One day in early winter the richest man in the county is found dead in his camping tent, mauled by a bear. The coroner’s verdict is heart attack, caused by shock. But Steve is skeptical. Why did this man, an accomplished outdoorsman, commit a rookie error like eating breakfast in his tent, where bacon grease could spill and lure a bear in?

Over the weeks following the death, Steve begins a private, off the record investigation of his own. What are the victim’s secrets? Who might have reason to hate him? Is someone training bears to kill? At the same time as he’s sleuthing, Steve also begins a romance with an attractive local widow, which raises the stakes in the story and adds human interest.

The writing is crisp and good. Season’s Revenge is a promising first novel in a series likely to only get better (my only plot quibble was a twist that I saw coming a mile away). Steve Martinez is an appealing, very human protagonist.

My problem is with the treatment of religion in the book. I hasten to say that author Kisor does not insult my religion, evangelical Christianity. To the contrary, he takes some pains to portray evangelicals as generally decent and generous people.

I was troubled instead by Steve’s own spiritual quest. He has rejected his parents’ Christianity, and through the course of the book he is drawn more and more to the spirituality of his ancestral tribe, of which he knows very little. He even has a couple visions.

I am no enemy of ethnicity, as anyone who reads this blog knows. I’m about as ethnic as you can be without (I deeply hope) being an actual racist. But I’m repelled by the idea of ethnic religion. I do not care for the efforts of some of my fellow Scandinavians to cultivate a “native” Scandinavian spirituality, based on Old Norse mythology. In the same way, I disapprove of other groups adopting “ancestral” religions, based not on objective truth but on “blood.”

As a Christian, I believe that truth is one. To say that there’s one truth for people of one color, and another truth for people of another color, is (it seems to me) the profoundest kind of racism. It denies common humanity; it denies that we are all brothers under the skin.

So thanks, Henry Kisor, for a pretty good mystery novel. But I won’t be back for more.

Cautions for language and sexual situations.