Mystery Series- Alex McKnight

Steve Hamilton

Steve Hamilton writes the award winning Alex McKnight series.

McKnight is a private investigator of sorts. He was a Detroit cop, but after his partner was killed, he moves to the UP of Michigan. After a short unsuccessful stint as an official PI, he manages to continue to attract serious trouble and solve mysteries.

Location: Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan, primarily between St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie including the Bay Mills Reservation.

Violence and language.

Recurring characters of note:
Alex McKnight, reluctant private investigator
Vinnie LeBlanc- a Chippewa Indian, his good friend
Leon Purdell- another friend and sometimes P.I.
Natalie- his girlfrind
Jeannie- his ex-wife

#1 A Cold Day in Paradise 1998
Alex has returned to the UP of Michigan to a string of cabins built by his now-deceased father. He's trying to fix up the cabins and rent them to fishermen, etc., while living in one of them himself. He is still fighting survivor guilt from the incident that ended his career as a Detroit policeman. His partner was killed and he survived when they were gunned down by a mentally unbalanced man. Alex had to take early retirement at 3/4 pay.

Edwin, a good friend, has an addiction to gambling. He keeps promising to go straight, but can't keep it up. Meanwhile, things are awkward because Mike had an affair with Edwin's wife.

When Edwin calls Alex in the middle of the night to report that he has found a man in a motel room with his throat slit, Alex goes there first, and then reports to the police. The police are not happy they weren't called first and Alex finds himself in constant trouble with the Sault Ste. Marie police chief.

Edwin seems to have a connection to yet another murder, and then he goes missing.

The perpetrator begins to target Alex, and the evidence points to this being the man who shot Alex and his partner in Detroit. Corrections insists that man is still in prison in Jackson.

This story has more than one plot twist, and it won the Edgar Award.

#2 Winter of the Wolf Moon 2000

#3 The Hunting Wind 2002

#4 North of Nowhere 2003

#5 Blood is the Sky 2004

#6 Ice Run 2005

#7 A Stolen Season 2006
Summer never seems to arrive in the UP that year. Natalie has returned to Detroit to take on an undercover assignment to capture a gun smuggling ring.

Alex and his friends rescue three men who are so drunk they crash their boat, an historic Chris-Craft, into some old pilings. As thanks for this, Alex and friends are hounded and continually beaten up. A locked box that went down with the boat is missing, and the boaters are sure Alex has it.

#8 Beneath the Book Tower: An Alex McKnight Short Story 2011

#9 Misery Bay 2011

#10 Die a Stranger 2012

#11 Let It Burn 2013

#12 Dead Man Running 2018
This will probably end up being one of the best books I've read this year.

A serial killer is apprehended in Arizona, and he says he will reveal the locations of previous victims, but he will only talk to one person. That person is Alex McKight. The FBI flies him out west.

Alex can't figure out any relationship between himself and Martin, the killer. Martin knows fact after fact about Alex. The FBI doesn't want to believe that Alex doesn't know him.

Martin engineers a mass murder and his own escape, and Alex must chase him across the country, finally discovering the connection between them. Then the "game" becomes personal.

The author credits several true crime books about serial killers as research material that I have also read. The whole book is chilling.

#13 Riddle Island (Short Story) 2020

Mystery Series - Fletch

Gregory McDonald

Gregory McDonald won back-to-back Edgar Awards for best first novel, and best original paperback, in 1975 and 1977. These books are quite raw for the 1970s. The language and themes are definitely not "cozy," and there is plenty of casual sex. However, the plots are complex and clever. The style is almost entirely dialog, and quite clipped. The humor is tongue-in-cheek, which I find pretty funny.

Fletch is variously a reporter and an art writer, having been educated in both. He's a complete free spirit. You never know from one book to the next where he will pop up.

Recurring characters:
Irwin Maurice Fletcher, I.M. Fletcher, commonly known as Fletch.
Marilyn Moxie Moonie, Fletch's friend since childhood.
Alston Chambers, he begins as a rookie attorney in a big law firm, but moves to the DAs office.
Crystal Faoni, an overweight reporter
Jack Faoni, Crystal's son

#1- Fletch 1974
Winner of an Edgar Award. A rough-and-tumble tale of a reporter, Fletch, who is hired to commit a murder. Who is to be murdered? The man who hires him! Fletch is undercover to get the scoop on the local drug dealer in his beach town. His newspaper is giving him a hard time because it's taking so long to get answers. Meanwhile, he's busy also trying to find out why he's been hired to kill someone who seems to have a nearly perfect life, and he's also busy avoiding paying alimony to two previous wives.

An example of the humor: "At eleven-thirty, the phone began ringing persitently. He knew it was... any one of several News-Tribune executives who routinely became excited, one way or the other, in pleasure if they were real professionals, in anger if they were not, when a staff member had snuck a genuine, unadulterated piece of journalism over on them." ,

#2- Confess, Fletch 1976
Winner of an Edgar Award. Fletch has been living in Europe, but comes to Boston to track down some paintings that were stolen from his fiance's father. The father, Count deGrassi, was kidnapped and held for ransom, but without the paintings, the money demanded can't be raised.

Fletch arranges for an apartment swap through an agency so he will have a place to stay in Boston. He arrives, cleans up and goes out to dinner. When he returns, the naked body of a murdered young woman is on the living room floor. Naturally, the police would like him to confess.

There are more twists to this story than you can imagine.

#3- Fletch's Fortune 1978
Fletch is blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of his fellow journalists at a national convention. They say they'll make his ever-mounting tax debt and crimes go away if he complies.

On the very first morning of the convention, the President pf the Journalism Association is murdered. He made lots of enemies over the years, but which one of them hates him enough to do the deed.

The recordings Fletch collects turn out to be useful in other ways, as well.

#4- Fletch and the Widow Bradley 1981
Fletch is back to being a reporter, but he gets fired from his newspaper because he quotes the CEO, Tom Bradley, of a company as being alive when it turns out the man has been dead for a year. Fletch is understandably put out because his boss is giving his incompetent girlfriend good stories and not firing her for little errors.

Meanwhile, he finds a wallet with $25,000 dollars in it, but is having a lot of trouble returning it to the owner. The man doesn't seem to want the wallet back.

Fletch sinks his teeth into finding out what happened to Tom Bradley. The answer is surprising for 1981.

#5- Fletch's Moxie 1982
Moxie has a job acting in a movie that is being filmed. It's not a good script and it's not going well. Moxie has become concerned about her finances- her financial manager has told her some things that are concerning. However, money is not her strong suit, and she has just signed whatever he told her to for years.

Fletch shows up at the filming of a talk show interview with Moxie and Steve Peterman. Steve is the director of the show and her financial manager. During the interview Peterman is stabbed and dies. Yet nothing unusual shows up on the tapes.

Moxie wants Fletch to find out what's wrong with her finances.

Secondary story is of Moxie's father, an aging, well-known classical actor who has been drunk for decades. Keeping him in line is almost a full-time job in its own right.

#6- Fletch and the Man Who 1983

#7- Carioca Fletch 1984
This book is almost a travelogue of Carnival in Rio de Janiero with a bit of story woven in. One of the characters from Fletch, Joan Collins Stanwyk, reappears in this book.

Fletch is enjoying a vacation in Brazil when an old woman approaches and insists that he is her husband, Janio, who was murdered 47 years previously. She wants him to tell her and her children who murdered him.

Fletch ends up being cursed with Brazilian voodoo, chased by a pack of kickboxers, and hounded by Janio's young grandson who has only one leg.

Joan, who reappears in this book, then disappears!

#8- Fletch Won 1985
Although written in 1985, this is really a prequel which tells the story of how Fletch got started in journalism.

As a rookie, he is assigned to write headlines, but he is too clever, and gets reassigned to cover the announcement of a gift to the art museum. The giftgiver is murdered in the News-Tribune parking lot, and he is reassigned again to cover a thinly disguised brothel. Then he gets fired! But that doesn't stop him from pursuing both stories.

#9- Fletch Too 1986

#10- Son of Fletch 1993
Events of Confess, Fletch are recalled in this story.

Fletch is confronted by an adult man who certainly appears to be his biological son. This encounter gives us the most sympathetic and human portrait of Fletch in any of the books.

The primary plot is a set in a neo-Nazi organization bent on creating anarchy and taking over the United States for white supremacy. There are a lot of stereotypes, but it's eerie for a 1993 book. This is my least favorite of the Fletch books.

#11- Fletch Reflected 1994
This is a fairly odd story. Fletch's son is called by an old girlfriend, Shana, to come investigate the estate of an eccentric genius. The genius, Chester, has built a huge closed community. He rigidly controls his wife and four adult children who live there.

Shana is convinced that someone is trying to kill Chester. There have been multiple accidents from which the man has barely escaped. Fletch's son calls Fletch, and while they are at the estate they learn the depths of the children's hatred for their father.

I would say the story is an allegory of some kind, but I'm not sure the Fletch books are that deep. It is an interesting plot, for sure.