In this second volume of the Minnesota Trilogy, Norwegian author Vidar Sundstøl continues exploring the rift between the past and the present, between European settlers and the native inhabitants of the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, and between two brothers living on the shores of Lake Superior in the present. Though I am not a series-order purist, this is truly a trilogy, not a series of mysteries with recurring characters. This story will make a great deal more sense if you’ve previously read the first volume, The Land of Dreams. And if you haven’t, you might want to stop reading this review right now, because I can’t avoid serious spoliers for the first book. I’d turn back if I were you.

Are we all right then? Ready to carry on? I did warn you.

Okay . . .

We know from the first volume that Lance Hansen, a “forest cop” who patrols Cook County, Minnesota’s national forest lands, discovered the body of a murdered Norwegian tourist. Officials from the state and a Norwegian detective take on the investigation. In parallel, Hansen comes to believe that one of his ancestors who came to Minnesota from Norway may have murdered a native man, Swamper Caribou, in 1892. Hansen is literally haunted by the past, since he keeps seeing a man who appears to be from another time. And he’s haunted, too, by his suspicion that his brother Andy may be the man who killed the Norwegian visitor. That seems impossible when the detectives make an arrest, until Hansen uncovers another family secret: DNA evidence that the murderer had Indian ancestry had ruled Andy out as a suspect. But Hansen discovers that he and Andy have Ojibwe ancestry.

The second book is quite different in tone. Though it’s short, it’s packed with a densely threatening atmosphere. The mood is obsessive, claustrophibic, and almost hallucinogenic at times. It opens as Lance and Andy are engaged in a Minnesota tradition: hunting deer. They take turns driving the deer and shooting. But it’s clear from their tense interactions that they’re really hunting each other.

As the men track through the dense woods, we learn what happened in 1892 from the point of view of a young Norwegian immigrant as he crosses the frozen lake, hallucinating as he fights off hypothermia, frightened by the world he’s in and its savage inhabitants, determined to get his own piece of the new world. His story is interwoven with the hunt, each narrative growing more intense, more disturbing, less connected to what we think of as reality with each turning page. The natural world itself is transformed as an ices storm descends on the North Shore, making the woods beside the vast frozen lake a labyrinthine and disorienting forest of ice. It’s in this weird, frozen world where the past and present touch, where the hunter becomes the hunted, where things are stripped down to their elemental essence.

This is not a comfortable book. Though it doesn’t take gruesomeness to the heights that the average serial killer thriller aspires to, the violence in it is far more real and much more disturbing. And because the story is so disorienting and unresolved, it doesn’t provide the usual resolution that readers expect from the genre, that at least justice is served in the end. Perhaps that will come in the third book, but I wouldn’t count on it.

At one point in the book, as Lance is following his brother into the woods, he thinks to himself:

. . . were the rules still valid after what had happened? Was it even possible to talk about things like rules anymore? Lance had broken the most important rule of all, which said that specific subjects were not to be discussed. Not under any circumstances. The world he knew was a world that was held together by keeping silent about certain things. These things were not clearly defined, but everybody who lived in the same world as Lance recognized them at once whenever they cropped up. As long as no one broke the rule, this world would continue to exist. It had already endured for a very long time.

Though this book is short, it’s packed with strangeness, The rule of silence, once broken, lets all kinds of weird things bubble up. I’m very curious to find out what will happen in the third book of the trilogy.

This is probably more about my expectations and my inability to get behind what the author was trying to do in this book, but after the first installment of the Minnesota Trilogy, Land of Dreams, I found this a complete disappointment.

This was not a novel, in and of itself, but rather part two in the serialization of the first book. Except for the brief sections illuminating the back story (absolutely necessary for someone like me who can't remember the details of mysteries these days), the entire thing was the interior dialog of US Forest Service ranger Lance Hansen -- out hunting with brother Andy whom Lance is certain committed the murder in book one -- contrasted against the italicized thoughts of the 19th century immigrant uncle whom Lance believes committed the first murder at Baraga's Cross in 1892.

It might have helped if I'd known that this was just some sort of hunting-in-an-ice-storm ramble -- then I would at least have chosen a different time to read it -- but I went into it expecting a new mystery for Lance to investigate. As a result, I skimmed madly.

And a word to those who like an actual resolution to their mysteries: the first book ended with the wrong man behind bars -- this one ends in total ambiguity. I fully expect book three to pick up where this one left off in this three-part serialization of a single novel. ( )

Disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher.

Only the Dead is a short sort of thriller that feels very different than the first book in the Minnesota trilogy, The Land of Dreams. It works best if you've read the first book in the trilogy, which involves U.S. Forest Service officer Lance Hansen's investigation into the stabbing death of a Norwegian tourist at Baraga's Cross at the Cross River on the Northern Shore of Lake Superior, but if you're one for taut thrillers, I'd skip the first lengthy book and start with this one. He believes it to be the first murder ever in the county until he suspects one of his ancestors of having murdered Swamper Caribou, an Ojibwe settler. The two stories alternate in this book as well as in the first book, and they take on a sort of hallucinatory quality.

So what exactly goes on in Only the Dead is a series of hunting trips with Lance and his brother Andy, whom he suspects murdered the Norwegian tourist. Lance is fueled by guilt because another man is in jail facing murder charges, but he can't prove that his brother is the murderer. Andy in turn is suspicious of his brother, and their hunting excursions in increasingly dire weather in early winter are very suspenseful.

I read this book because I'm invested in the case of the dead Norwegian kayaker, and I'm glad this book felt like a surprise compared to the first one. It's a thoughtful book as Lance tries to come to terms with his family's past and his ancestor's past (he discovered he has Ojibwe ancestors in the last book). I wonder how the case develops in the next installment, entitled Ravens, and I wonder what kind of format that book will take: meditative crime story or a thriller?

Only the Dead is the second book in author Vidal Sundstol’s Minnesota Trilogy and it continues the story of forest ranger and amateur historian Lance Hansen who had discovered the body of a young Norwegian tourist on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He had begun to suspect his brother, Andy, of the crime but even after the arrest of a man he thought was innocent, Lance couldn’t bring himself to reveal his suspicions.

In this second book, Lance and Andy are on their annual deer hunt but the hunt is marred by suspicion and tension on both sides. As he spends this time alone with his brother, Lance becomes more convinced of Andy’s guilt. On his side, Andy is convinced that it was Lance who broke into his cabin and is lying to him about it. When an ice storm begins and the two are separated, Lance loses his way. He become increasingly paranoid as he sees or imagines Andy stalking him. As Lance tries to find his way in the storm, he imagines an eerily similar story about a relative who immigrated to America a century earlier and his possible role in the disappearance of an Ojibway man.

Sandstol is a master at creating mood with his use of language and description. Despite this being the same story, these two books have completely different feels to them. The first book seemed wider in scope and lighter in tone despite the murder. Sundstol devoted much of the first book to descriptions of the role the area played in the early fur trade, of the small towns, and details about the early Scandinavian immigrants to the area as well as giving a much broader outline of the earlier mystery. Somehow, all of this gave a strong dreamlike quality to the first book. Even the title was less dark, reminiscent of the song, Land of Dreams which was part of a Discover America campaign and, in many ways, this first book was as much an ode to the beauty and history of the area as it was a mystery.

Only the Dead, on the other hand, is much darker. All of the action is confined to a small and isolated area of dense forest and within a shorter time span. There is no sense of history or civilization. This reduction in space and time gives the tale a strong claustrophobic feel. Even the character of Lance seems much darker in this second part. There is a greater sense of tension and immediacy to the conflict between him and Andy than there was even about the murder in the first book. The ice storm and Lance’s disorientation makes it even more chilling as does the similar and eery tale of his ancestor’s own search for the American Dream.

The juxtaposition of tone between Land of Dreams and Only the Dead outlines the more nightmarish qualities of this second book. Where the first book is slower, more objective, more real, the story here has taken a much darker almost mystical turn. In some ways, it seems more active even though much of the action is only in Lance’s imaginings. Where the first deals with events in a more objective way, the murder, the investigation and the actual history of the area, this deals much more with Lance’s own interpretation of events including the murder a century earlier coloured by his fears and suspicions.

Where the first book was, despite all of the history and description of the area, at heart, a straightforward police procedural, Only the Dead is a straightup psychological thriller But despite their differences, the two books are tied together by their intelligence, by the beauty of the language and descriptions, and by their exploration of death and the complex nature of families, what binds them together and what tears them apart. ( )

http://bogbrokken.blogspot.com/2011/05/vidar-sundstl-de-dde-2011.html ( )