Review by New York Times Review
A STARTLING MOMENT occurs in Jim Harrison's 2011 novel, "The Great Leader," when the protagonist, Detective Sunderson, abruptly reflects on an incident that has landed him in the hospital. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Diane, has left with all of her things, and Sunderson drinks a bottle of Canadian whisky. "This had gone on a couple of days and ... a colleague had checked up and found him facedown and comatose on the floor of the unheated enclosed back porch after a 10-degree night." Up until this point, Sunderson's steady drinking has been recklessly celebratory in this whisky-soaked novel, the kind of soaking one expects from a divorced detective at the outset of his retirement. But when he blithely reveals that he spent a few days unconscious, all the previous pages are cast into a foggy doubt. Just how screwed up is this guy, and exactly how stewed has he been for the past several chapters? Such is Harrison's gift for conveying human consciousness and all its vexing diversions and understatements and circular thoughts. In his latest novel, "The Big Seven," a sequel of sorts to "The Great Leader," Sunderson's troubling consciousness returns, particularly unreliable, the circles circling tighter. Regrets over Diane's departure compete with his vast culinary and sexual appetites. Fond memories of his dead brother and nascent ruminations on the nature of the seven deadly sins churn in a mind that eddies and pools and presses on. Beneath the surface, retired Detective Sunderson is quite a lot like the rivers he fishes. "The Great Leader" ended on a grace note, with the bad guy comically debilitated in an ATV accident, and Sunderson reconstituting his family. Sort of. He and Diane, though divorced, adopted an abandoned minx named Mona who had been flirting with Sunderson and badly needed a father figure. The relationships at the close of that book remain tenuous at best, but you come away with a sense that Sunderson is going to be all right, simply by being the strange kind of father and ex-spouse he can manage to be. And so "The Big Seven" finds Sunderson coming to the rescue of his strange family, heading to New York to save Mona from a musician who has spirited her away from college. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. He extorts $50,000, and winds up with a broken back. Mona runs off to Europe, but Diane shows up to nurse him back to health, if not let him back into her life. You lose some, you win some. Thinking the rehabilitation he needs is a cabin and some good fishing, Sunderson finds and purchases a property adjacent to a family by the name of Ames, the most outlandish of the Upper Peninsula's out-landers. They are an ardently murderous, incestuous clan, existing in a horrific feudal system, with the men alternately eating, drinking, working the land and fighting one another when not raping their wives, sisters, cousins and daughters with an alarming lack of consequence. Neighbors and cops alike steer clear. As in "The Great Leader," Sunderson's detective work provides a bit of comic noir - for one thing, he proves to be mind-bogglingly intimate with the Ameses, who are murdering one another to a purpose that Sunderson cannot help trying to suss out. Complications ensue. Brawls and gunfights erupt, often during car chases. Bodies wash up on the shore of the river. It seems that one of the Ameses is steadily killing off the rest of the clan. It's not entirely clear why Sunderson cares. He's mostly haplessly mixed up in it because of professional curiosity and proximity. When a young Ames woman finds her way into his bed and, just as important, his kitchen, he's drafted into their war. Also as in "The Great Leader," the bad guys aren't the main draw. The back story of the Ames clan is largely prepared for Sunderson by Mona. She vaguely hacks the Internet for the information when not driving him crazy with her flirtations. Indeed, the main pursuits of this retired detective aren't villains but women, food, fish and alcohol. Which is another way of saying that he is running away. The pleasures of "The Big Seven" are found most often in Sunderson's troubled, heavily marinated meditations. He thinks a lot about sin, in particular the "eighth sin" of violence, which he commits himself to describing on paper. "He had been still in high school when he read about the siege of Leningrad," he thinks. "He recalled trying to fish when his mind was drowning in the idea that the world was a madhouse and had always been one." Among Diane's complaints about Sunderson was that he wouldn't change jobs, but it's clear he's drawn to the scene of the crime. He rather likes being the one who gets to say, "Move along; there's nothing to see here" - partly, no doubt, because he recognizes there's perhaps everything to see there. Sunderson's reading and reflections on his job would be ample material for a treatise on the iterations of human evil, and the Ameses keep providing grist for the mill. Scarcely a page passes without beatings, incest, gunfights, poisonings, blackmail and the rampant child abuse these backwoods maniacs visit on one another. Coupled with the plaguing memories of Sunderson's police work, the book is a litany of pulped spouses, burned children and terrifying encounters with senseless violence. Sunderson is terribly inured to it, and Harrison's rangy prose restlessly delves into these horrors. But the hardest part of the proceedings is watching Sunderson try to cope through meatloaf, bourbon and sex. He is supernaturally gifted at finding succor in the form of women who will cook, make love and, if not fix him a highball, at least tolerate his alarming intake. Despite his thorough recklessness, though, Sunderson is a tough old survivor. And like all of Harrison's protagonists, he is supremely aware of his predicament and the biological absurdities of being a man. Usually this means observing women with a constant, helpless lust, as when he escapes to Europe late in the book: "Her legs were brown and when she sat on the bench for a few minutes her skirt flashed up a bit in the breeze off the river and his heart felt a pang at the bareness of her legs. How hopeless. When does it stop?" Never. It never stops. The ego, the wandering, the violence, the bottomless hunger, the lust - they just might be life enacting itself. What else is there? It's in this late chapter, the book's finest, that Sunderson recalls "a rare honest evening," realizing that the "drinker was the intense center of his own universe, his perceptions rather lamely going outward but colored utterly by the false core." Hence the constant fishing, because "it was hard to think about yourself while staring at a river. In fact you couldn't do it." Sunderson at last realizes that he's been "sunk in the male hoax of fishing and drinking," perhaps in the nick of time. He may never get Diane back, but he just might be capable of love again. Amid senseless violence, Harrison's hero looks to meatloaf, bourbon and sex. SMITH HENDERSON is the author of the novel "Fourth of July Creek."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The ever-befuddled Detective Sunderson (The Great Leader, 2011) is still a retired cop living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but, retired or not, he remains hip-deep in troubles, many of his own making. The idea of buying a remote cabin near a trout stream in the upper part of the U.P. sounds good, until the cabin turns out to be adjacent to a compound that's home to an inbred batch of outlaws who make the Snopes boys look like the chamber of commerce. Naturally, Sunderson gets involved with the vodka-swilling Ames clan, offering writing advice to one of them, who developed a yen to pen mysteries while in prison, and making love to a couple of the female members whose age puts them just north of legal and a long way from Sunderson's sixtysomething. Along the way, he muses on the seven deadly sins (the titular big seven) and on his abiding passion for ex-wife Diane, who stops counting Sunderson's drinks long enough to rekindle some passion of her own. This one is even less of a mystery than its predecessor, but who cares when you can watch and listen to a character who somehow combines the boisterous spirit of Falstaff with the neurotic soul of Woody Allen, a randy, boozing backwoods philosopher who sins with raucous abandon, frets about what it means, and then comes back for more, all with a life-loving romantic streak that makes you, well, want to put a little sin back in your own life.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Retired detective Simon Sunderson returns in the latest from Harrison (after The Great Leader), which the author describes as a "faux mystery." This time Sunderson is investigating a series of homicides near his newly purchased fishing cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The victims are all members of the Ames clan, a nefarious backwoods family, and the first act of violence strikes down Lily, Sunderson's housekeeper. After entangling himself intellectually with aspiring writer Lemuel Ames and physically with 19-year-old Monica Ames, Sunderson devotes himself to tracking down the culprits, all the while suspecting his beautiful paramour to be behind the crimes. Characters from the detective's previous adventure return, including sidekick Mona, who assists Sunderson by scraping together information on the Ameses, and Diane, the ex-wife he still fancies. The novel takes its time finding its story, with characters introduced early who never reappear, and at one point, Harrison halts his hero's investigation with a long vacation to Mexico. This wandering can frustrate, as can the hillbilly stereotypes and Sunderson's obsession with female posteriors. But when our hero is neck deep in his quest for justice, snooping while also considering the seven deadly sins (hence the title), Harrison proves once again that he is an inimitable, inexhaustible talent. Agent: Steve Sheppard, Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Now retired, detective Sunderson (introduced in The Great Leader) upgrades a cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to enjoy the trout fishing, only to find that his lunatic neighbors, the gun-and-vodka-fueled Ames family, will shoot at anything, themselves included. Harrison, one of the best, appropriately calls this a "faux" mystery; Ames men are being poisoned and there is a culprit, but the mystery is subordinate to observation and speculation. If Lee Child is a Wellcraft speedboat, Harrison is an excursion boat. Much of Sunderson's musing centers on the seven deadly sins, especially lechery; after only a few chapters the 66-year-old protagonist has "been with" two teenagers, one his adopted daughter. Flawed, he meditates on his imperfections (as he works on an essay about the eighth deadly sin-violence-with help from his ex-wife)-as well as politics, trout, wrongs done Native Americans, history, sex, more sex, and writers on a long spectrum, from Raymond Chandler to Sir Thomas Browne. VERDICT Maybe not Harrison at his best but not far off either. Fox News addicts and Tea Party types should avoid; this is a treat for curious and speculative mystery readers. [See Prepub Alert, 7/28/14.]-Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ex-cop Sunderson is as bemused as ever in Harrison's follow-up to The Great Leader (2011)."The Big Seven" are those deadly sins their Lutheran pastor thundered against when Sunderson was a boy, leaving him with a permanent fixation on his own and others' moral failings. Lechery and gluttony are definitely the big ones for the now-retired Michigan State Police detective: This semimystery contains the same abundant, enthusiastic descriptions of food found in virtually all Harrison's work, and the heavy drinking that led to Sunderson's divorce from still-beloved Diane doesn't keep him from a booklong affair with 19-year-old Monica or a one-night stand with his adopted daughter, Mona (both relationships, improbably and distastefully, initiated by the young women). Sunderson's misdeeds pale in comparison to those of the Ames family, which occupies three ramshackle farmhouses near his fishing cabin in rural Michigan. Monica is one of the low-life clan's many women abused from childhood by male relatives; the lurid plot is launched by her sister Lily's death in a shootout with her cousin Tom, both wielding AK-47s. It doesn't get any more plausible after this, as an epidemic of poisonings carries off several more Ameses, none of them any great loss. Violence should definitely be considered the eighth deadly sin, concludes Sunderson, whose efforts to write an essay on the subjectand to cut down on his drinkingbring him closer to Diane and the possibility of a reconciliation. You can't help but like feckless, unpretentiously intellectual Sunderson, inclined to tie himself in metaphysical knots when not fishing or otherwise engaging with the natural world whose splendors, movingly described, succor him in a way nothing else can. The poisonings are resolved with yet more bloodshed, and the possibility of another case for our hero is blatantly flourished. After a lifetime of deep, dark fiction like Dalva (1988) and True North (2004), Harrison is entitled to relax with these autumnal ramblings. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
