SummaryAutumn in Michigan's Upper Peninsula means hunting season,
and the fall of 1950 finds most everyone in St. Adele
township hunting for something—deer, grouse, uranium; love,
redemption, escape; a story, a husband, a murderer. When
the son of summer residents at the exclusive Shawanok Club
is found dead after an uproarious dance at the town hall,
the sheriff is flummoxed, and everyone is appalled: Bambi
was found in the loft over the tool shed, bound, gagged,
and inexpertly scalped. Who better to search for the killer
than St. Adele's reluctant constable, John McIntire? The
trail he must follow branches off like the spokes of a
wheel, in multiple directions, leading to multiple dead
ends. The only common link seems to be the boy's parents: a
father who is mysteriously unavailable, a mother, on a
mission to see her son's killer dead, who remains
sequestered in her rented mansion, baking cream pies and
playing the piano. Her imported private eye seems more
interested in dallying with McIntire's exotic Aunt Siobhan,
who's just turned up on his doorstep some 25 years after
she ran off with a carnival worker as a teen. And Bambi's
mentor on a summer's search for uranium, a hot prospect in
Flambeau County, is more conversant with archaeological
artifacts than Geiger counters. McIntire's investigation
takes him from the haunts of the affluent visitors, to the
backwoods camp of a Rube Goldberg hermit, and finally to an
abandoned gold mine where he learns what really happened
that summer's night....
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