Alex McKnight
Created by Steve Hamilton

Paradise is a small town on Michigan's upper peninsula, hidden among the pine trees on the shores of Lake Superior. There you'll find ALEX McKNIGHT, once a minor league catcher, and later a Detroit police officer who left the force after a particularly bloody shootout fourteen years ago, which left him with a few bullet holes in his body, and one bullet they couldn't dig out, perilously close to his heart. So now it's the quiet life for him. Or at least that's the plan. Alex runs a hunting camp, left to him by his late father, renting out cabins to tourists in the summer, hunters in the fall, and snowmobilers in the winter, while trying to shake his past. He only reluctantly takes on private investigative work, at the urging of a local lawyer, or his overly-enthusiastic partner Leon Prudell. It seems Alex has a hard time saying "No."

"The one thing that's going to set this character apart from most other private eyes," says author Steve Hamilton, "is the fact that he has absolutely no interest in being a private eye in the first place. He gets talked into it in this first book, and it turns out to be a big mistake. I'm going to see just how many books I can do, in fact, without him ever actually taking an official case."

Alex's promising debut, 1998's A Cold Day in Paradise was the St. Martin's Press/PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Contest winner of 1997. It also won an Edgar and a Shamus, making Hamilton the only author so far to win both awards for his first novel.

UNDER OATH

• "(Alex) must be hard-boiled if he can put on hockey goalie equipment for the first time at about age 40 and play goal against some top players, as he does here. To a hockey player like myself, that's science fiction." (Kent Morgan in Winnipeg)
  
  
• "Hamilton is a superb storyteller.  If you haven't read him, do yourself a favor."
  (Mike Hayes, author of the Mad Dog and English series)

NOVELS

• A Cold Day in Paradise (1998)...Buy this book
• Winter of the Wolf Moon (2000). Buy this book
• The Hunting Wind (2001). Buy this book
• North of Nowhere (2002). Buy this book
• Blood Is the Sky (2003). Buy this book
• Ice Run (2004). Buy this book
• A Stolen Season (2006).. Buy this book

RELATED LINKS

• Blood is the Sky by Steve Hamilton The Thrilling Detective Web Site review by James R. Winter

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks, as usual, for keeping me honest, Jan.