Let It Burn: An Alex McKnight Novel
A teenager Alex McKnight helped arrest for a savage murder is being released from prison. McKnight decides to make a sentimental journey to Detroit, scene of his finest hours as a cop as well as subsequent events that derailed his life and caused him to seek refuge on Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. But soon after his arrival in the city, he begins to think he may have helped send an innocent teenager to prison, and he is determined to set things right. Let It Burn reads like several different kinds of novel. It begins with a man approaching 60, looking back ruefully on events that ended the life he’d anticipated. Then, in flashback, it describes the frantic hunt for the murderer before returning to the present and becoming a private-eye novel. By turns, it is either gauzy and impressionistic or a minutely detailed procedural. McKnight’s vision of now-devastated Detroit is tremendously compelling, but the changes in tone are jarring, and several plot convolutions at the book’s end strain credulity. --Thomas Gaughan