By Mike Sherack
Beaver’s Pond Press: September 2008
ISBN: 1592982506
At the start of deer season in Idaho, someone begins hunting the hunters. The FBI takes over the case after the killer runs a classified ad in the Idaho Statesman, warning that the slayings will continue until officials end the hunting season. The FBI’s top agent in such matters, Max Miller, is dispatched to Boise.
Let me get this said: I’ve been a vegetarian for thirteen years, and while I’ve never hunted, I have fished, and I’ve spent teenaged mornings and afternoons shooting birds. Dad hunted, though, and I still favorably remember the taste of deer decades later.
Back in Idaho, the killer continues picking off hunters. In an attempt to draw out the further enraged killer, the FBI procures a pickup truck which they plaster with the recently-created local bumper sticker: Hunt Deer Not People. Impatient and wanting the killings stopped, Max convinces his superior to let him become a physical target, waiting day after day in the same spot in the hope the killer will see him and try to take a shot.
It’s never mentioned in much detail, but our boy Max Miller has become something of a celebrity in the Bureau for a successful mission in Hell Canyon, Oregon. He’s a young buck of twenty-nine, and in the incredible shape we expect our heroes to be, with superhuman stamina and tenacious perseverance. There are a handful of near misses, and even a couple of sightings of the killer before justice is realized, and Max rides off into the sunrise, returning home to Minnesota.
For this story of good guys versus bad guy, Sherack has written commendably. There’s surely a future in writing more such stories, if he wants. I fear, though, this is his “one story,” the one we all supposedly have in us to tell. It’s obvious Sherack is passionate about the core subject of his story: hunting. Alas, his passion gets in the way of his story, and his unneccesary afterword is further evidence he might have still more to get off his chest.
A number of scenes that appear to be written for the sake of defending hunting, rather than for telling the story, fall flat, and characters are too often two-dimensional. An Idaho Statesman classifieds manager seems included only to provide an opportunity to soapbox about the idiocy of anti-hunters and those pesky liberals making their way out West. Even Max and his fellow agents get diminished when they serve the author and not the story, (such fine effort creating such thorough characters, and in these moments of detour, Sherack shoots his story in the foot).
Still, should Sherack plan future stories, a Max Miller series is thunderously waiting to happen. Evocative storytellers always have a place at the fire.
Eduardo Rey Brummel wants to be at the head of the booksigning line when the Mike Sherack’s next Max Miller thriller comes out.
