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In his second book, Gruley returns us to Starvation Lake, Michigan. It's February 1999, a year after the events in the first book, STARVATION LAKE, and Gus's life is somewhat mixed. He's seeing old girlfriend Darlene Esper, a sheriff''s deputy separated from her husband. But her husband is now back in town. Gus has been named executive editor of the Pilot. But his boss is young, inexperienced – and the nephew of the media company's chief executive. On a cold winter night, Gus's life is to become more complicated. His cousin, Gracie McBride, who had recently returned to town, is found an apparent suicide, hanging from the "shoe tree," so called because young lovers, in a tradition started by Gracie herself, would entwine their shoes and hang them from the tree. But a missing shoe – and no sign of the ladder that Gracie would have needed to climb up to commit suicide – lead Gus and Darlene to question whether Gracie killed herself. Gus travels downstate to Detroit, where Gracie used to live, to investigate. He finds connections to Laird Haskell, an unscrupulous lawyer hoping to build a new ice rink in Starvation Lake. Gus has uncovered some financial irregularities surrounding the construction, but neither the town council nor Gus's publishers want to hear of it – or publish it. Hockey is king in Starvation Lake, and even the townspeople don't want Gus to write about the rink. But Gus continues to raise questions, even as his job is on the line. Gruley has written a taut mystery that is even better than STARVATION LAKE, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. The first book was packed with play-by-play descriptions of hockey games, but those have been toned down, and THE HANGING TREE flows at a quicker pace as a result. There are plenty of twists and turns and the resolution, when it comes, is like a puck shot that has slammed into the net when you weren't looking. § Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, July 2010
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