Book description
January, 1951, while the country is in the grip of war in Korea, the
threat of nuclear annihilation, and Senator Joe McCarthy's Red Scare,
the residents of St. Adele, Michigan, are more concerned with staying
warm and shoveling snow until a bizarre ice storm brings down a towering
pine. Entangled in its roots is evidence that leads Constable John
McIntire to the abandoned farmstead of a young couple who had supposedly
left the community years before, part of an exodus of Finnish-Americans
gone off to build a workers' Utopia in the Soviet republic of Karelia.
McIntire's fears are realized when he discovers two bodies, buried
sixteen years in an unused cistern. In his zeal to uncover the truth,
McIntire brings the scrutiny-and the suspicion-of a Red-hunting
government agent upon his neighbors and himself. It is only the
beginning of his mis-calculations. Each step in investigating the deaths
seems only to bring more misery to the living. Old wounds are opened,
old terrors rekindled, and old wrongs exposed. McIntire himself is not
immune. He struggles to solve the two-decades-old murders, while a part
of the past he hoped to bury forever threatens to destroy his new life.
Constable John McIntire, Sheriff Pete Koski and their neighbors in St.
Adele, a small town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, must deal with the
effects of isolation and far-away political events in Hills' absorbing
third mystery (after 2004's Hunter's Dance). One January night in 1951,
an ice storm has the hardy residents of St. Adele on edge, but it's the
discovery of two human skeletons in a cistern on the farm that once
belonged to Rose and Teddy Falk that really upsets everyone. The couple
were thought to have resettled in Soviet Karelia with other ethnic Finns
in 1934, lured by the promise of a worker's paradise. Now it appears
they never left. Many of those Finns later returned, disillusioned, to
the U. S., and FBI agent Melvin Fratelli fears Communist spies are
lurking even in this remote community. As McIntire investigates,
complicated family intrigues rise to the surface and lives change
irrevocably. Unidentified news squibs before each chapter help place
this illuminating tale in the context of the McCarthy era. Kathleen
Hills spent the first forty years of her life in rural Minnesota before
leaving for the real world and a career in speech and language
pathology. After determining that ten years in the real world should be
all that is demanded of anyone, she turned to writing. She is the author
of Past Imperfect, Hunter's Dance, and Witch Cradle, mysteries set in
1950s Michigan featuring John McIntire, township constable. Kathleen
divides her time between northern Minnesota and Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
