The Bottom Line: A mesmerizing crime thriller that is alternatingly charming, savage and cinematic. Recommended for fans of C.J. Box and Craig Johnson.
When former Canadian commando Lou Gault and his wife inherited the charming fly-in sporting lodge Havre de Poisson, they took on more than just a speculator wilderness destination. They also inherited a legacy. The lodge and surrounding forty-five square miles was a gift from his paternal grandfather, Grey Elk. The land is all that remains of the once vast ancestral lands of an eastern band of Abenaki. What’s more, the lodge’s loyal guests often come to fish in the spring, and again in the fall to hunt.
An exception is Luigi Secondo, the only person to book a cottage for the entire 23-week season. He’s a curious guest. Luigi doesn’t fish, nor does he hunt. Just one thing is for sure – he loves the Italian food cooked by Havre de Poisson’s Chef Angelo. It comes as a shock when Luigi offers to buy the place in an all-cash deal. Lou turns him down flat, but Luigi won’t take no for an answer – even offering to keep Lou on to manage and control the place.
Author Dave McKeon keeps readers one step ahead of Lou through alternating chapters that take place in Luigi’s world. We soon learn that in the world of organized crime, Luigi is known as ruthless mobster Santino Varni. He employs killers like “Popeye,” who savagely garrotes a prosecutor to death in the opening chapter. We also learn that Luigi is not merely an alias. Santino suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), also known as split personality disorder.
While it’s clear from the early going that Lou and Luigi are on a collision course, McKeon piles layer-upon-layer of suspense into the first half of the book. McKeon starts by seeding comments from Lou’s wife, Kate, previously of Ireland’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Kate doesn’t share her husband’s live-and-let-live attitude about their guests, and is determined to get to the bottom of how Luigi comes by his wealth. Later, things ratchet up significantly when Luigi, acting as Santino, opens up to his crew about his desire to own the lodge, and Lou’s reluctance to sell. The first ideas to come from their brainstorming session? Poison the water, burn Lou out, or stop the float planes from flying in and out. At Santino’s insistence, they land on something a little more “surgical.”
For newcomers to McKeon’s Lou Gault series, Sabotage, the fourth book in the series, is a viable entry point. McKeon delivers just enough backstory to convince us that Lou and Kate are proprietors who are not to be reckoned with, and the world McKeon creates in remote New Brunswick is thoroughly absorbing. McKeon’s landscape descriptions are top-shelf, while scenes featuring wolves, deer, fisher cats and other creatures make clear how isolated – and vulnerable – prey are in such surroundings. The question is, in the battle for control of the lodge, who will be the predator, and who will be the prey?
