The Hunting Wind by Steve Hamilton was just as good the second time around!
One of the things that I have been doing on a fairly consistently this winter and into the spring is reading, I have set a goal that requires me to read books at a faster pace than last year and while i on a pace that is slightly slower than I need it to be, I am still reading at the same pace as last year finishing book 15 of the year just about on the same day as I finished book 15 last year!
Now one of the things that I did do recently that is out of the ordinary is that I reread a book! When ever my wife wants me to get rid of books she always says that I should get rid of them because I never reread a book! Well, while she will have to change that to you almost never reread a book, because I reread Steve Hamilton‘s The Hunting Wind a last week! One of the reasons that I reread the book was that when I checked my Goodreads shelf for the book it was not there! The status was “want to read”!
When I started rereading the book which is book #3 in Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight series, I didn’t remember the storyline. The adventure begins when Alex’s former minor league teammate, from his days thirty years prior as a catcher with the Toledo Mud Hens, visits Alex’s home in Paradise, in Michigan’s upper peninsula and wants him to help find a girl he dated for ten days way back in 1971!
As Alex and Randy start their search for Maria who was the daughter of a fortune-teller Madame Valeska, they discover that Maria is in hiding. Maria is hiding from her dead husbands former business partner, who Maria believes murdered her husband and now is out to get her! But soon it appears that all is not as it seems to be and maybe it never was??? I think that it took until somewhere in the middle of the book that things started to become familiar and even when they did things still weren’t all that familiar, i.e. I didn’t remember the ending, which by the way is very good!!
Steve Hamilton’s first book to feature Alex McKnight a former Detroit police officer for eight years,now living in Paradise, MI, A Cold Day in Paradise won both an Edgar and Shamus award which was an unprecedented feat! The series is now up to book number 10 Let It Burn, which I think I once checked out of the library but did not read! Alex is a great character and the surrounding cast in the series is also very good. While Alex’s friend Vinnie is not featured in this book Jackie and the Glasgow Inn are present.
Bottom line: The Hunting Wind is a real page-turner even when I kinda knew what was going to happen. Like I said Alex is a great character and the story line twists and turns enough to keep the pages flying by. So check it out!
As for rereading a book it was a pleasant experience. It appears that I most likely read The Hunting Wind in 2004, as that’s, when I read books 1,2 and 4. So maybe the key to rereading books is that it works real well for books I’ve read 10 or more years ago!! Let’s see that would put most of the Robert Ludlum in play and many, many more!!
