Customer Reviews

A Cold Day in Paradise (Chivers Sound Library American Collections)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Opinion only - No Story Spoilers

Hamilton does a fairly good representation of Upper Michigan and the twin cities of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan/Ontario and area. Clearly he has spent enough time there to cite specific locations and directions, and he captures the atmosphere pretty good, if somewhat cliche. The location lends a different backdrop to basic plotlines, and he works that backdrop into the stories in this series. A refreshing approach to a well used genre.

This is a good weekend read and very enjoyable -perfect for an afternoon by the pool or a rainy weekend at the cottage. It is a little on the 'easy reading' side of things, and not as involved plotwise as something by Ludlum or Clancy, but it is very easy to fall into the story very quickly, or pick it up again after a break. A good style for a tired mind after a busy week. I have recommended this series to others and will continue to do so as I look forward to the next book.
-Start at the beginning, as parts of the stories build on each other.

A Cold Day In Paradise 2000
Winter of the Wolf Moon 2001
The Hunting Wind 2002
North of Nowhere 2003
Blood is the Sky 2004
Ice Run 2005
A Stolen Season 2006
Misery Bay 2011

This first of Steve Hamilton's Alex McKnight series is a tight, well-done book. There's great emotional truth to all the characters, and Hamilton exercises restraint in his hero's musings, as well as in the overall portrayal of a man haunted by his perceived failures. Nothing is predictable and all the characters are fully-drawn, particularly the mad and pathetic Rose. In one brief climactic confrontation between McKnight and Rose, the frustration and anger of a rational mind coming up hard against an irrational one has powerful resonance. Anyone who's ever tried to reason with someone unreasonable will sympathize with McKnight's helplessness and outrage at being unable to communicate on any "normal" level.

Filled with surprising twists, a lot of tension, and a splendid depiction of life in a cold zone, this is a well-crafted book with a likeable, very human cast. Highly recommended.

Steve Hamilton comes at you from several different directions in his first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise. That's Paradise, Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior in the upper peninsula. The setting and local color are terrific. Alex McKnight, ex-minor league baseball player, ex-Detroit cop with a bullet still lodged in his chest and now a private investigator, works his way through two murders, a missing person case and a monster killer from his past that leave you guessing until the very end of the book. Good characters. Tight plot. A real page-turner. This is a book you won't be able to put down. Steve Hamilton's got a real winning combination here.

Mr. Hamilton is familiar with the territory in this book. He knows the Upper Peninsula and has written a first rate book about the people, the special places, and a crime that is so convoluted that it kept me guessing until the end. I live in the U. P. and am familiar with his various locales. He brings a new twist to what could have been an old story. And he makes one feel the anguish Alex goes through as he fights his fears and finally faces them. I just finished this book today, came home from work, and ordered his second one immediately. That is how impressed I am with Mr. Hamilton's writing.

I wanted to like this novel---I really, really did, because it had apparently received rave reviews and the beginning of the book was promising. But if you're an avid reader like me who is always looking for something new and exciting, you'll be as disappointed in this book as I was. The characters were flat, unimaginative and two-dimensional. The writing was about as exciting as the back of a cereal box. The plot was strange and unbelievable. Sometimes a book with these flaws can be saved by stellar prose, but that wasn't the case with this novel. The writing was blunt, plain and unevocative. Imagine someone without much personality---say an insurance salesman or someone who fixes air conditioners for a living---sitting you down and telling you a story about four or five uninteresting people. That's the level of excitement that this book generated for me. If you want well-developed characters, poetic prose and interesting plots, look elsewhere. This was a halfway decent effort from a first-time writer, but I'm stunned and amazed that so much praise has been heaped upon such an average effort.

I simply couldn't put this book down. The verbiage, along with character and plot development were better than many experienced authors. I look forward to Mr. Hamilton's next book. Please don't rest on your laurels and become like Danielle Steele, Mary Higgins Clark, et al, whose first efforts were far better than their later works. Congratulations! I truly enjoyed this one - not predictible up to and including the ending.

In this first novel by Steve Hamilton, Alex McKnight is an ex-cop from the mean streets of Detroit. With a bullet imbedded next to his heart, he retreats to the cold of Paradise, Michigan. Now a private investigator for a lawyer, Alex is content until he stumbles across a murder scene, and the sight of blood stirs horrible memories of his partner's death in Detroit. Eerie messages addressed to him sound remarkably like the disturbed psycho who shot him and his partner fourteen years ago. But he's in jail! How can he be in two places at once? Hamilton writes a superb thriller that catches you right from the start. Alex is an intriguing character--not mancho and yet not a wimp either. His fear of the past was so gripping that it really set the tone for this eerie murder mystery. Can't wait to read the next one in the series!

A COLD DAY IN PARADISE

Steve Hamilton has written a daunting, well-woven, first time out thriller that delivers. He introduces Alex McKnight - former professional base-ball player, ex-Detroit cop - who with drink, dames and drugs has managed to hold at bay the ghosts and traumas of his past.

Life's follies have turned McKnight into a low calorie version of the consummate looser. Bad knees ended what might have been a marginal stay in the Big Leagues. Later came a more promising career in law enforcement and that ended abruptly by a yellow-wigged, psycho living in a tin-foil wrapped apartment . Score that round for Rose, who during a routine surveillance strokes his own demons and, without warning, brandishes an Uzzi, fires away at McKnight and makes mincemeat of Franklin, McKnight's partner.

In the aftermath drink, depression, a broken marriage take their toll as McKnight lives and relives the shooting.The docs gave it their best.They removed two of the three slugs. The third, too close to McKnight's heart to risk an operation, remains untouched, embedded within him and, more than a permanent, transportable shrine to Franklin, its significance inescapably fused into McKnight's existence.

After all this who could blame the guy for being morose and brooding? And who cares how he spends his time on his land in Upper Michigan Peninsula, chopping wood, renting a cabin or two during the hunting season, pocketing disability checks and hoping like hell to get through the nights when the visions of Franklin, of Rose, of all the splattered blood on the aluminum foiled walls make the pills necessary?

Yet, some people are not content to let basket cases be basket cases. Not Edwin Fulton, poor faced gambler, stinkingly rich - with "friends" to help relieve just such a problem. Or Fulton's wife, Sylvia, gorgeous and bored. Or Uttley, lawyer on a mission, who recruits McKnight to be his own personal, part-time PI. And now into this sleepy, rural community comes murder, inescapably connected to McKnight's past.

Hamilton takes us on a tightrope act, entertaining and daunting. He plots a good who-done-it, keeps well within the bounds of the mystery genre. No crime fantasy here, despite what seems like a killer etherizing from a cell to outwit police and PI alike. The logic of the plot is simple, but at times blurred. Often, Hamilton goes interior, churning through McKnight's fears and desperation, building suspense, juggling scorecards and bringing into doubt McKnight's own mental stability. For a good portion of COLD DAY, the tethering back and forth on the possibility that McKnight has no enemy - no stalker - tries Hamilton's handling of his material and tweaks our sense of being hoodwinked. Is he pulling the baseball cap over our eyes and keeping the reader purposely at a loss so he can find a suitable conclusion to what would seem to be an impossible situation? This is the book's curiously daunting element . As COLD DAY unfolds, the reader begins to fathom the notion that Hamilton is playing loose and fast with details we need to have - in deed, must have - allowing us to be cleverly challenged and to make a run for the solution but not haplessly deceived by an author who has exited the parkway of inspiration. To his credit, Hamilton steers a straight course and in a rather remarkable way he parlays what might otherwise be a growing sense of reader flimflammery into a structural, satisfying element that serves his purpose. At the novel's conclusion we are left with the only singular outcome possible and gives us cause to reflect upon the balancing act of crime detection's age old mighty questions: "Who did it?" and "Why?"

Schalti Berlin 21.Aug. 1999

Yup. It's a real place, not too far from my home. And it's populated by the bartenders, drunken locals, Indian casinos, and log cabins Hamilton describes in "A Cold Day in Paradise". And greed, lies, manipulation, and terror are real, too. This compelling novel isolates those human traits, puts them in the chill of Northern Michigan, and spins a story I couldn't put down. One whole weekend I sat in my cabin in the woods, listening to the chill winds outside, reading this novel in front of my fireplace. I was in paradise.

I suppose allowances should be made for this being a first novel but generally I found it rather unsatisfactory. The characters all tend to be unsympathetic ( Someone is murdering bookies, Like who cares?) The hero is a walking cliche, a P.I. who an ex sport figure, ex cop with a bad experience (the violent death of his partner) and who is also, quite frankly, a bit of a whiner. The few attempts at wisecracking dialogue are rather feeble and the explanation of the intriguing premise of how someone is a high security prison is leaving taunting messages for the hero is rather a letdown.

I did like the setting, a small town in Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior, the wintry descriptions and the interplay with the local characters as they sit in the tavern drinking their *imported* Canadian beer.