Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery Hardback - 2003

""When a fire is done, what's left is only half-destroyed. It is charred and brittle. It is obscene. There is nothing so ugly in all the world as what a fire leaves behind, covered in ashes and smoke and a smell you'll think about every day for the rest of your life.""
Steve Hamilton is one of crime fiction's rising stars. His first novel, "A Cold Day in Paradise," won the Edgar Award, and each successive novel has met with widespread critical acclaim. Now Hamilton raises the stakes dramatically in his most accomplished work to date.
Reluctant investigator Alex McKnight finds himself drawn by friendship into a long drive north. The brother of Alex's longtime Ojibwa friend Vinnie LeBlanc works as a hunting guide, serving the rich clients from downstate. It seems that Vinnie's brother and his most recent group of hunters have vanished in northern Ontario, and Vinnie is scared enough to ask Alex to help him find them.
Their arrival sets in motion a heart-pounding string of events that leaves Alex and his friend miles from civilization, stranded in the heart of the Canadian wilderness with no food, no weapons---and no way out. And there's someone out there who definitely does not want them to make it back alive.
At once elegant and enormously suspenseful, Steve Hamilton's "Blood Is the Sky" heralds his arrival as one of the premier crime writers working today.