Amazon.com ReviewDoing their best to ensure the future of the genre, St. Martin's Press and the Private Eye Writers of America give out an award every year for the Best First Private Eye Novel. The 1997 winner was this splendidly evocative work by IBM employee Steve Hamilton, which takes just about every cliché in the field and turns it inside out. Yes, Alex McKnight was an athlete in his youth--but a minor league baseball player, not a top pro forced out by injury. And yes, he was a cop in Detroit before he moved up to the town of Paradise on the shores of Lake Superior--but even this overused genre icon is made believable by the details of a particularly bloody shootout. In Paradise, Alex runs a hunting camp built by his late father and only drifts into private investigations because of two friends, a persuasive lawyer and a local millionaire with a gambling problem who needs his help. When two bookmakers are murdered and the millionaire disappears, all the signs point to the psychopath who killed McKnight's partner and left a slug near Alex's heart 14 years before. The only problem is that this man has definitely, positively been in prison ever since. You might figure out the plot twists a page or two before McKnight does, but don't bet the farm on it. And the deep layer of details that Hamilton provides about life in this bleak part of the world add to the book's many pleasures. --Dick AdlerFrom Publishers WeeklyHamilton combines clear, crisp writing, wily, colorful characters and an offbeat locale (Michigan's Upper Peninsula) in an impressive debut. Alex McKnight is a retired Detroit cop living in Paradise, Mich., on disability with a bullet next to his heart. He rents cabins to hunters and has recently taken out a private-detective license at the suggestion of Lane Uttley, a local lawyer. The book begins fast, with a lot of background deftly woven into the narrative. At a local bar, the lawyer's former investigator accuses Alex of stealing his business. Later, Edwin Fulton, the scion of a wealthy Detroit family and a compulsive gambler, calls Alex from a nearby motel where he has found the murdered body of his bookie. After Edwin's strong-willed mother hires Alex to protect the family, another local bookie is murdered and Edwin disappears, prompting Alex and the lawyer to start a search of their own. Meanwhile, Alex receives letters and calls that appear to be from the Detroit man who shot him and whom the then-cop had helped send to prison for life without parole 14 years ago. Hamilton cleverly joins the plots, leaving but one disappointment: how long it takes Alex to learn to place his trust in others with care. (Sept.) FYI: This book won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin's Press Award for Best First Private Eye Novel of 1997.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers WeeklyThe chill of Michigan's Upper Peninsula doesn't cool the action in Edgar-winner Hamilton's expertly paced seventh Alex McKnight novel (after 2005's Ice Run). On an unusually frigid Fourth of July night, the retired Detroit cop and his sometime partner, Leon Prudell, save three men from a boating accident in Lake Superior's Waishkey Bay. But the men return to accuse their rescuers of stealing a locked box off the boat, and Alex discovers that they're squeezing members of the Bay Mills Indian reservation for government-financed prescription painkillers. As Alex closes in on the dealers, he narrowly avoids death. Meanwhile, his long-distance girlfriend, Ontario police officer Natalie Reynaud, goes undercover in Toronto to ferret out an illegal arms dealer. When she pays Alex a surprise visit at his Paradise, Mich., cabin, their operations intersect with tragic results. Plot turnarounds and double-crosses ensure a startling conclusion. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistHamilton, who received the Edgar Award for his first mystery, A Cold Day in Paradise (1999), is now on his seventh installment in the series starring private eye Alex McKnight, who works as a cabin curator and sometimes private eye in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. McKnight has a familiar backstory for a private eye: he is a one-time cop with a troubled past (in McKnight's case, the trauma of having his partner killed). Hamilton, however, uses McKnight's break from his former life as a way of exploring his character's efforts to escape despair and find some semblance of meaning. He found at least some of that meaning in the last adventure, Ice Run (2004), in the form of a tentative love affair with a female cop. This time the action shuttles between McKnight's attempts to stop a prescription pain-killer drug ring in Paradise, Michigan, and his girlfriend's assignment to Toronto as an undercover gun dealer. Hamilton's gamble of putting the most exciting action offstage with the girlfriend pays off big-time here. Hair-raising suspense with poignant characterization. Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In the stunning follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Second Life of Nick Mason, the remarkable hero fights to take back control from the crime lord who owns his life, as he races to complete a daring and dangerous new mission. . . . Nick Mason has been given a true mission impossible: Infiltrate WITSEC, the top-secret federal witness-protection program that has never been compromised, locate the three men who put his boss Darius Cole behind bars for life, and kill them. But first he has to find them—they're ghost prisoners locked down around the clock in classified "deep black" locations by an battalion of heavily armed U.S. marshals charged with protecting them—and the clock is ticking. Cole is appealing his conviction, and these witnesses are either his ticket to freedom or the final nail in his coffin. If they testify, Darius Cole will never step foot in the outside world again. If they are killed, he will walk out a free...

Alex McKnight--hero of Steve Hamilton's bestselling, award-winning, and beloved private eye series--is back in a high-stakes, nail-biting thriller, facing the most dangerous enemy he's ever encountered.On the Mediterranean Sea, a vacationer logs on to the security-camera feed from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Something about his living room seems not quite right--the room is bright, when he's certain he'd left the curtains closed. Rewinding through the feed, he sees an intruder. When he shifts to the bedroom camera, he sees the dead body.Martin T. Livermore is the key suspect in the abduction and murder of at least five women, but he's never been this sloppy before. When the FBI finally catches him in Scottsdale, he declares he'll only talk to one person: a retired police officer from Detroit, now a private investigator living in the tiny town of Paradise, Michigan. A man named Alex McKnight.Livermore means nothing to McKnight, but it soon becomes clear McKnight means something to Livermore...and that Livermore's capture was only the beginning of an elaborate, twisted plot with McKnight at the center. In a hunt that will take him across the country and to the edge of his limits, McKnight fights to stop a vicious killer before he can exact his ultimate revenge. And his grand finale will cut closer to home than he ever could have imagined.**Review*Praise for Dead Man Running **“Brilliant . . . The plot develops in multiple unexpected directions, and its logical convolutions are matched by Hamilton’s deepening portrayal of his fully realized lead.”—Publishers Weekly *“Alex McKnight’s been put through the ringer before, but never quite like this. . . . Steve Hamilton rakes his hero over the coals, taking him to hell and back as he faces off with a man so evil that he’d scare the hell out of the devil himself. Full of twists and turns, Hamilton’s latest McKnight novel is raw, dark, and absolutely relentless. . . . Dead Man Running proves that Steve Hamilton is one of the best crime writers on the planet, and his latest showing will leave readers begging for more.”—The Real Book Spy“Hamilton’s long-awaited reboot of the McKnight series is a streamlined, gut-wrenching thriller.”—Booklist**Praise for Steve Hamilton and the Alex McKnight series **“Whatever he writes, I'll read. Steve Hamilton's that good.”—Lee Child“Steve Hamilton writes the kind of stories that manly men and tough-minded women can't resist.”—The New York Times“I'm often asked to recommend a detective series readers might have missed. This is it.”—Harlan Coben“Hamilton's compelling, vigorous prose doesn't allow the option of taking a break.”—Los Angeles Times“Steve Hamilton writes tough, passionate novels with a strong emphasis on heart and humanity.  This is crime writing at its very best.”—George PelecanosAbout the AuthorSTEVE HAMILTON is the New York Times-bestselling author of fourteen novels, most recently the critically acclaimed Exit Strategyand The Second Life of Nick Mason. His debut,A Cold Day in Paradise, won both an Edgar Award and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His standalone novel The Lock Artistwas a New York Times Notable Crime Book and won an Alex Award and the Edgar Award for Best Novel. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won the prestigious Hopwood Award for writing, and now lives in Cottekill, New York, with his wife and their two children.

At the age of eight, Michael survives an act of violence so horrific that the local press dubs him 'The Miracle Boy.' And orphan now, and no longer able to speak, Michael soon discovers the one thing he can do better than anyone else. Whether it's a locked door with no key, a padlock with no combination, or even an 800-pound safe.Michael can open them all. It doesn't take long for him to become a hot commodity, and the best 'boxman' in the business. But like any valuable commodity, there are people who will do whatever it takes to own him. And once they see what Michael can really do, they're not about to llet him walk away. Traveling all across the country, always on the run.If there's a heist in the works and a group of criminals with the right phone number, then Michael is their man. And he is always successful. Always. Until one day, when a seemingly simple job turns into a nightmare, and everything falls apart. With nothing left to lose, he decides to go back home to find the only person he ever loved. And to finally face his bigger secret – the secret that has kept him silent for all these years. Best-known for his Edgar-and Shamus-winning Alex McKnight series, Steve Hamilton delivers a knockout standalone that will bowl over both his diehard fans and anyone looking for a bold, one-of-a-kind thriller.

Amazon.com ReviewALEX MCKNIGHT IS BACK in the long-awaited return of one of crime fiction's most critically acclaimed series.On a frozen January night, a young man loops one end of a long rope over the branch of a tree. The other end he ties around his neck. A snowmobiler will find him thirty-six hours later, his lifeless eyes staring out at the endless cold water of Lake Superior. It happens in a lonely corner of the Upper Peninsula, in a place they call Misery Bay. Alex McKnight does not know this young man, and he won’t even hear about the suicide until another cold night, two months later and 250 miles away, when the door to the Glasgow Inn opens and the last person Alex would ever expect to see comes walking in to ask for his help. What seems like a simple quest to find a few answers will turn into a nightmare of sudden violence and bloody revenge, and a race against time to catch a ruthless killer. McKnight knows all about evil, of course, having faced down a madman who killed his partner and left a bullet next to his heart. Mobsters, drug dealers, hit men—he’s seen them all, and they’ve taken away almost everything he’s ever loved. But none of them could have ever prepared him for the darkness he’s about to face.Author One-on-One: Steve Hamilton and Michael Koryta In this Amazon exclusive, Steve Hamilton is interviewed by fellow thriller author Michael Koryta. The tables get turned when Hamilton interviews Koryta on the The Ridge page.Koryta: Misery Bay opens with relentless good cheer--a frigid night, a corpse dangling from a tree. And, back for the first time in a few years, Alex McKnight. Tell us a little about how it felt to be back with him from the writer's perspective.Hamilton: It was great to be back, for the simple reason that it had been so long. Almost five years between books! I hadn’t planned on being away from the series for so long, but I sorta ended up getting lost at sea there for a while. A standalone that just about kills you will do that.Koryta: You opened your career with seven straight Alex McKnight novels, and then followed with two standalones, including last year's The Lock Artist, which just won the Edgar for best novel. Did you always know you were going to return to Alex, or was there a time when you thought you were done?Hamilton: I knew that, after A Stolen Season, the last McKnight book, I really needed to take a break. And that Alex needed a break, too--as strange as that may sound to say about a fictional character. I just couldn’t bring myself to drag him out of his cabin, into some new sort of trouble again. Does that make any sense?Koryta: Absolutely! I know you don't write from an outline. What's something from Misery Bay that stands out as a favorite unanticipated development?Hamilton: I guess that would have to be the relationship that develops between Alex and his old nemesis, Chief Roy Maven. I knew they’d have to unlikely allies in this book, but actually having them together for so long, I was surprised to see how well that worked. I wouldn’t call them good friends or anything at this point, but they definitely had to come to a new understanding about each other.Koryta: We both got our publishing start through the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest. So tell me: who's your all-time favorite fictional detective, and who is a newer discovery that you're excited about?Hamilton: All-time favorite fictional detective? Still has to be Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder, I think. As far as a newer discovery... If you’re talking about a new private eye, I honestly don’t know of one right now. The genre has been down a little bit lately, and I haven’t read anything new and great for while. (Maybe this year’s contest winner? There’s always hope!)Koryta: As I look over my shoulder at the Steve Hamilton section in my bookshelf, I can't help but notice some repeated themes in the titles: winter, north, ice, cold, wind. And, oh yeah, misery. Be honest: are you really that inspired by cold weather, or is this evidence that you desperately want to move to the tropics?Hamilton: To me, when I think about “hardboiled” or “noir,” I think about cold. When just going outside to your car is an act of courage, that has to say something about you already, right? I know that Raymond Chandler’s idea of hardboiled was a sun-baked street in Los Angeles, but for me there’s just something about a frozen lake and a cold wind that will turn you inside-out.Koryta: I’m in sun-drenched Los Angeles right now and it’s tough to argue that point. This is your 10th novel. It has been 13 years since your Edgar-winning debut, A Cold Day in Paradise. What has changed in your perspective and approach to writing in that time and throughout those books?Hamilton: Well, it doesn’t get any easier. Or at least it shouldn’t, or else you’re doing it wrong. And I’m STILL waiting for a great idea for a book to come floating by and land on my shoulder like a some kind of beautiful butterfly. These authors who have all these great ideas that just come to them out of nowhere, I want to slap them. If I have one sorta half-baked idea that might get me through one chapter, I’m lucky.Koryta: What's next--another Alex or another standalone? Give us a taste.Hamilton: The publisher really likes this return to Alex thing, so they want some more of that. More importantly, I’m finding it’s pretty great to be back in Paradise. So for the next two books, at least, it’s Alex McKnight all the way! I know I’ll take breaks again and try new things, but it’s nice to know I can always to come back to see what he’s up to next.ReviewPraise for Misery Bay:"_Misery Bay_ showcases Hamilton's dark vision and his talents as a sturdy plotter. ... Hamilton's view of the harsh, bleak landscape of winter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula will have readers grabbing their coats and gloves as the frigid air seems to seep through the pages. Misery Bay is like a visit with an old friend with whom you can't wait to catch up."--_Sun-Sentinal_"A triumphant return for McKnight. Misery Bay is as good as the previous ones in this critically acclaimed series. The plot is as suspenseful as they come, with lots of unpredictable twists and turns."--_The Associated Press_"Superb.... Assured prose, a thrilling plot, and a surprising, satisfying conclusion make this a winner."--_Publishers Weekly _(starred review)"Hamilton's prose is straight and clean, as devoid of pretense as the author's name — Steve, just Steve, with no accompanying initials. The book's complexity comes in Hamilton's gift for layers and the slow reveal."--_Seattle Times_"The best mystery novel I’ve read in a while."--John J. Miller, The National Review"I'm often asked to recommend a detective series readers might have missed. This is it. Hamilton has been flying under the radar with his Alex McKnight series for too long. Misery Bay will change that, I hope."--Harlan Coben"This new entry in Hamilton's Alex McKnight series is one of his best. ... You'll not put this down willingly, and when you do, you'll still be thinking about it."--_Romantic Times___ "Outstanding."--_Yahoo! Shine___ "A solid, character- and conflict-driven procedural with one of his twistier plots."--_The Boston Globe_ "Hamilton is as good as anyone out there when it comes to fast-paced dark mysteries."--_City Pulse_Praise for Steve Hamilton:“Hamilton’s compelling, vigorous prose doesn’t allow the option of taking a break.” —_Los Angeles__ Times “Steve Hamilton writes the kind of stories that manly men and tough-minded women can’t resist.” —The New York Times _"Hamilton writes tough, passionate novels.... This is crime writing at its very best.” —George Pelecanos “Hamilton gives us mysteries within mysteries as well as a hero who simply won’t be beaten down.” —_The Miami Herald _“Already one of our best writers.” —Laura Lippman “Hamilton’s prose moves us smoothly along and his characters are marvelously real.” —_Publishers Weekly “Hamilton’s prose...remains an unself-consciously terse pleasure.” —Entertainment Weekly “Hamilton... paints a rich and vivid portrait of a world where the chill in the air is often matched by that of the soul.” —The Providence Journal “Hamilton never misses a beat.” —Rocky Mountain News_"I really like his main character, Alex McKnight, and I'm ready to re-visit Paradise, Michigan."--James Patterson on North of Nowhere

Before the tragic event that made him seek refuge in a remote corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Alex McKnight was a Detroit police officer.  It’s a warm summer night, and Alex is out riding the night shift with his partner Franklin.  There’s no shortage of trouble to be found on the dark streets of Motown.  But on this particular night, Franklin has his own agenda.  From Edgar Award-Winning Author Steve Hamilton, Beneath the Book Tower is the first ever short story featuring Alex McKnight, showing a different side of the man readers have come to love. Review“Hamilton’s compelling, vigorous prose doesn’t allow the option of taking a break.” —Los Angeles* Times“Steve Hamilton writes the kind of stories that manly men and tough-minded women can’t resist.” —The New York Times*"Hamilton writes tough, passionate novels.... This is crime writing at its very best.” —George Pelecanos“Hamilton gives us mysteries within mysteries as well as a hero who simply won’t be beaten down.” —*The Miami Herald*“Already one of our best writers.” —Laura Lippman“Hamilton’s prose moves us smoothly along and his characters are marvelously real.” —*Publishers Weekly“Hamilton’s prose...remains an unself-consciously terse pleasure.” —Entertainment Weekly“Hamilton... paints a rich and vivid portrait of a world where the chill in the air is often matched by that of the soul.” —The Providence Journal“Hamilton never misses a beat.” —Rocky Mountain News*

"I really like his main character, Alex McKnight, and I'm ready to revisit Paradise, Michigan."—James PattersonNew York Times Bestselling Author of Die a StrangerSteve Hamilton's novels have won the mystery world's most prestigious awards. Now, in North of Nowhere, he returns to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where former Detroit cop Alex McKnight has learned that wherever money goes, envy isn't far behind.After a game of cards turns into a professional heist, Alex McKnight finds himself lying facedown on the floor with a gun to the back of his head. When the dust settles, McKnight is one of the police chief's lead suspects. Worse, one of the other card players has the same idea, and he has no qualms about exercising some vigilante justice of his own. Now, Alex knows he is the only one who can uncover the truth. But he's about to discover how dark this conspiracy truly is—or how close to guilt he actually...