Reply To: Books I've Read

[Desert_Fox]

Running Dark (Woods Cop Mysteries #4) byJoseph Heywood

I seem to have missed a book in the series; Chasing A Blond Moon which is Woods Cop #3 and went to this one, #4 in the series. I don’t think it is much of a problem but Blond Moon is now on my purchase list.

Heywood takes us back in time to when Grady Service was a young, headstrong but able rookie conservation officer. He’s given his beloved Mosquito area but is soon pulled off of that to undertake a special assignment as part of the COs trying to make inroads into the Garden Peninsula where the “rats” were involved in an organized poaching of fish in Lake Michigan. This was dangerous, frustrating work where the rats were involved in large numbered attacks on the vastly undermanned COs charged with patrolling the area and stopping the poaching.

This is not a historical account of that war but a work of fiction, though based on a real situation called the Garden Peninsula War.

Grady is eventually taken off of the patrol and given an undercover mission, to observe and identify the rats and their leaders. He does this with the aid of a one legged school teacher who is fed up with the lawlessness and the intimidation of people by the rats and their leaders. He does this by walking miles through snow and staying in the shadows, watching and eventually doing a bit of sabotage to the vehicles of the rats.

After Service’s stint at undercover work he’s sent back to patrol the Mosquito but is eventually called on to do more patrolling in the Garden Peninsula. Mixed in with this is an attempted murder investigation where he’s sure he has the woman who stabbed a mentally challenged young man. . . until he’s given reason to think that maybe not is all that it seems.

The book ends with Grady in his real time (2004) and a bit of reflection on what happened those many years ago.

The story has many twists and turns and the ride is as bumpy as some of the two lane backwoods trails that are the paths of hunters, anglers, COs and poachers alike. It is a history lesson couched in fictionalized form and it shows the Upper Peninsula in all of it’s wilderness majesty, harsh but beautiful.

This is a story of dedication to duty, of an organization’s willingness to suffer hardships, cold and danger to protect the beauty of that wilderness and its denizens, human and animal alike.

Normally I make a few witty (well, I hope they are at least) remarks and though there were some funny moments in this novel, overall I was left with a sense of dread for what is to come (a blurb for a future read in the series had certain spoilers in it) and a sense of pride in a man who does his job and a bit more.

It’s a good read. A very good read.

 

[Note that my reviews will typically be posted in Goodreads then copied and pasted here.]

". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast