HANG FIRE

Implacable Sheriff Steve Martinez (Cache of Corpses, 2007, etc.) investigates a series of musket murders. Go figure.

Upper Michigan's Porcupine County hopes to lift its flagging economy with some Revolutionary War re-enactments targeted at summer tourists. The county board has urged Desert Storm–vet Sheriff Martinez, a Lakota Indian raised by a white family, to make sure things run smoothly with the re-enactors. Many of them, known as the Mountain Men, camp out together near the performance site and take method acting to an extreme level, living in character even when there's no audience around. When teacher Gloria Lake, who portrayed a seamstress in the re-enactments, succumbs to a fatal musket shot just below the rib cage, Martinez's role becomes more official. At first, Gloria's colleagues close ranks, offering Martinez no helpful information. After stonewalling in an initial interview, however, her good friend and fellow teacher Sheila Bodey admits that Gloria had also worked among the Mountain Men as a prostitute. Although Martinez's ladylove Ginny Fitzgerald reasonably explains how Gloria's death was most likely an accident, a judgment that becomes the official ruling, his gut tells him it's murder. Over the succeeding months, several more deaths by musket cast a cloud of suspicion over the original verdict and raise Martinez's hackles. Once murder is a given, the pieces of the puzzle fall, one by one, into place.

A confident and engaging whodunit. Kisor's prose is as refreshingly clean and balanced as the hero's investigative style.