They just keep pulling him back in
Cold Skies: A DreadfulWater Mystery Thomas King HarperCollins
Retired cop Thumps DreadfulWater is leading a cosy life as a landscape photographer in the bucolic burg of Chinook, Mont., when he’s pulled back into the detective game in the latest instalment of King ’s noir light mystery series.
Murder comes to town along with delegates to a politically charged water conference, and the case is far from the only disturbance in DreadfulWater’s otherwise placid life. A second victim complicates matters as he deals with a health crisis, an affair of the heart and a widening pool of potential suspects.
King (Truth and Bright Water), began the series in 2002 with DreadfulWater, penned under the pseudonym Hartley GoodWeather, and followed up with The Red Power Murders in 2006. Cold Skies has been a long time coming, but it’s not as if King has been idle. An Order of Canada honouree, he won the RBC Taylor Prize for his 2012 non-fiction work An Inconvenient Indian and earned the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Literature for The Back of the Turtle.
But fans of his laid-back Cherokee sleuth won’t have long to wait for a return to Chinook and another dose of King ’s gentle humour. Presumably, several loose threads — a temporary job as acting sheriff and a deepening romantic relationship, not to mention his cat’s fascination with a gangly new neighbour — will be tied up when DreadfulWater returns in A Matter of Malice, set for release in early 2019.