I first encountered Henry Kisor when I read his terrific book on the California Zephyr, traveling as a deaf man (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37815095). For years he was the book editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, and I once invited him to come speak at my college to discuss the difficulties faced by the hearing-impaired. A delightful man. I had no idea he had written a series of mysteries and was very pleased to see how good they are. He has another book on learning to fly and make a cross-country flight as a hearing-impaired pilot. Guy has guts.

Steve Martinez is a Lakota Sioux raised by white foster parents who grew up out east, went to Cornell, was an MP in the army, and then joined the Porcupine County sheriff’s department. (Kisor has a cabin in the UP so the scenery is familiar - he waxes familiarly on the differences between city and country people.) Porcupine County is in the UP (Upper Peninsula) where the seasons are simply “winter, winter, winter, and black flies.)

The local political bigwig, Paul Passoja, is found mauled by a bear after he went camping in the deep woods. The autopsy revealed early stages of Alzheimer’s and the man had been depressed recently so all signs pointed to an accidental death. The bear that did it was caught so that seemed to end that. But something just doesn’t seem right to Martinez who had found bits of bacon grease on the man, an accomplished woodsman, who knew better than to have any food near him in the tent in bear country.

Not a book for those who have to have a shooting, beating, or other violence on every page, this book develops the characters in a very nice way that has you liking them before you know it. Good mystery, lots of interesting information, and a nice romance.

On a personal note, I’d like to point out that being a sheriff’s deputy in a large county such as we have in the midwest or west is no small task. The area to be covered is immense and often there might be only two deputies to cover many square miles. The chief deputy of an Iowa county I know, remarked that at night, he was responsible for 2400 square miles (the county was roughly 60 miles by 40 miles.) Try hustling to an accident at the far end of the county during a blizzard. ( )

I picked up Henry Kisor’s mystery called Season’s Revenge because I had read a book by this author before. Henry Kisor, who was for many years the book review editor of the Chicago Sun Times, learned to fly in his middle age. Kisor had been reluctant to take flying lessons earlier because he is deaf; when he was in his fifties, though, he went flying with a friend who is a deaf pilot, and realized it was possible. His book, The Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet, recounts Kisor’s recreation of the first transcontinental flight early in the last century. His book struck a chord with me, since I didn’t learn to fly until I was sixty.
I called this series “Uncommon Mysteries,” and this one qualifies: the detective is a Lakota Sioux Indian with a Mexican name whose beat is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and who investigates a murder where the weapon was a black bear. There are some other surprises I won’t give away. This is the first of three mysteries Kisor has written about Steve Martinez, in the sheriff’s department of Porcupine County. Martinez was adopted as a youngster and raised in a white household. He looks like an Indian but thinks like a white. He knows the Upper Peninsula is ancestral Sioux land and feels its appeal, but he’s also too modern and rational to believe in this ancestral bond.
Kisor has admitted in interviews that this biracial or bicultural tug on his main character comes from his own sense of living in two different cultures: the hearing and the deaf.
Kisor peoples his fictional Porcupine County with believable folks, including the head of the local historical society, who provides romantic interest for Steve Martinez.
One aspect of the mystery is the curious historical fact that in the 1930s, Soviet Russia recruited hundreds of Finnish-American Upper Peninsula residents to emigrate to Karelia, a Finnish-speaking part of the Soviet Union. These people expected to get good jobs in Karelia and send money home, but a lot of them simply disappeared, and in Michigan their relatives who were left behind were unable to pay mortgages and lost their homes to land grabbers during the Depression. ( )