I shook my head. Lydia studied my face, looking for the lie.

“We’re just looking for answers,” I said.

That part was true—otherwise, I would’ve left this soggy grayscape days ago. Even now, the sun pulled a Houdini and went back to its usual place, shining somewhere over a cornfield in Kansas.

Luke Fischer, hero of Manistique, a Canadian transplant in Mexico, is emphatically not a private eye. But he ends up looking for people anyway. When his friend Franco, who is a private eye, asks him to sit in on a private poker game, he ends up witnessing a shooting. A young woman dies, and there’s talk of missing money. Soon Luke is headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places) trying to find the young woman’s father, who is rumored to have stolen a lot of money from some dangerous people.

In Michigan, Luke finds himself teaming up with “Sam,” an attractive female county sheriff. The body count rises steadily as they pursue Luke’s quarry, and when that man is killed, they pursue the killers. The trail will finally lead them all the way to New Mexico.

I very much enjoyed, and positively reviewed, Three-Minute Hero, the book that follows Manistique in the Luke Fischer series (I seem to be reading them in the wrong order). And the virtues of that book were displayed here – colorful hard-boiled prose and strong dialogue.

But the weaknesses were here too – a little more apparently. Chief of these is a certain aimlessness in the plotting. Although there’s plenty of violence in this story – and it’s pretty explosive – one can’t help wondering in the intervals what these people are here for. Luke’s mission is somewhat vague from the start, and even when he’s finished the job he was paid to do, he feels obligated to keep following the money –  though he doesn’t seem interested in it for its own sake. It’s something about justice, for people he barely knows.  One senses an echo of Carlos Castaneda, too,  as he has a mystical conversation on a motel porch with an old man who may or may not exist. Perhaps this is all an existentialist exercise.

I must also confess my slight annoyance at a surrender to current intellectual fashion, evidenced by the inclusion of not one, but two Girl Boss characters – women indistinguishable from men except in their physical appearance, one of whom easily tosses much larger men around a room.

And I have a couple Gun Culture quibbles – a .40 caliber pistol is described as remarkably powerful, and a “silencer” reduces pistol shots to a near-whisper (that’s technology firearms companies would pay good money for, because it doesn’t exist yet).

Author Craig Terlson is now a friend of mine on X, and an entertaining one. I like his writing very much, and all in all I enjoyed Manistique – especially as the story approached its big, climactic showdown. The next book in the series will show considerable improvement, so he’s learning the craft. I recommend this book, in spite of some weaknesses.