"CACHE OF CORPSES" by Henry Kisor (A-)

It would be obvious to state that not all crime takes place in New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles in spite of what many crime novels would have us believe. Small towns also have their fair share of crime no matter how distant and out of the way they are. Happily for us, a number of enterprising authors have sprung up to address the issues raised by crime occurring along the highways and byways of rural America.

This subset of the crime mystery genre is known as regional crime literature, and many of the authors who write stories that take place in rural America have a devoted following for those who have a taste for the oddball characters which seem to inhabit these locations. In addition, the locales usually have a charm all their own. Authors will tend to follow their passion, and if their passion is for a place where they live or a locale that they love, then the descriptions of the area and its inhabitants will tend to be filled with a special charm and nuance.

Joining the illustrious group of regional crime authors like Archer Mayor, Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Joseph T. Klempner, Rick Riordan, and others is Henry Kisor, formerly a book editor and literary columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. While Kisor lives just outside of Chicago, his heart is up in Porcupine County in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. "Cache of Corpses" is his third book starring Steve "Two Crow" Martinez, a tall, self-effacing Lakota Indian and college graduate who works as one of the deputy sheriffs of Porcupine County.

Martinez finds himself in a highly insular area where the "Yooper" (Derived from "U.P.") residents are suspicious of anyone who hasn't spent their entire life in the county. While many are of Finnish descent, there is a broad swath of descendants here from elsewhere in Europe whose parents and grandparents came to work the rich copper mines that dotted the countryside at the outset of the Twentieth Century. After the mines played out, the entire U.P. sunk into an economic malaise with abandoned homes and buildings evident almost everywhere. Huge areas of the county have also been set aside for Indian reservations, and Martinez finds himself both sympathetic and at odds with them since he is a Lakota and the Ojibwe who live here were formerly enemies.

With all of its problems, the entire Upper Peninsula, Porcupine County included, is still an area of extraordinary natural beauty filled with mountains, lakes, vast primeval forests, and the glories of Lake Superior. I know this from personal experience because I spent my college years at a university in the U.P., and I love the area. While my education took place further north in Houghton County, I traveled all over the Peninsula either on foot, in a car, or on a motorcycle. In my opinion, Keweenaw County, the finger-like peninsula that juts out into Lake Superior, is one of the most ruggedly beautiful places on the Earth.

Suffice it to say that I was thrilled to learn that Kisor has sited his stories in an area that I love so much. Dear reader, please cut me some slack here, for this reviewer has a soft and sentimental side that will always grant Kisor high marks for bringing me back, even if only in my mind's eye, to an area that I love so much.

"Cache of Corpses" is as much about life in Porcupine County as it is about crime. This is rather unusual in that the plot is just half the story and only an equal partner with the after-hours life of Steve Martinez. Usually the plot subsumes the lifestyle of the lead character with the off-hours being casually mentioned in passing only when necessary.

Here we have the pleasure of reading quite a bit about Steve's daily life and routines. Kisor has just about every other chapter involving itself with his personal life. Some readers looking for more action might find this to be a weakness of the story, and I will not be able to argue that point. My mea culpa is that I enjoy the moments spent reading about the characters as much as I do reading about their work in solving a crime. Furthermore, the crimes committed here are more off the wall rather than violent.

Two young lovers sneak into an abandoned and decrepit building known locally as the Porcupine County Poor Farm, a ramshackle place where indigent orphans were housed early in the Twentieth Century. Their plans for a tryst are dashed when they stumble upon a corpse.

Steve Martinez and his friend, State Policeman Alex Kolehmainen, are soon on the scene to examine the body, which turns out to be a fully embalmed corpse wrapped in plastic. The head and the hands are missing, which makes an identification impossible. The only identifying mark is a bar code on the plastic. Small change found under the corpse adds to the mystery.

The sophistication of the embalming techniques make it obvious that this corpse was stolen from a mortuary, but where, and how did it get to that isolated spot? Stealing and transporting stolen bodies was not considered to be a crime demanding immediate action, that is, not until a second headless corpse, also wrapped in plastic, is found at another isolated location. Martinez also has to deal with the distasteful likelihood that a resident, perhaps someone he knows, has to be involved because no outsider would know about these out of the way locales.

Then Tommy Two Bear, the Ojibwe foster son of Steve's girlfriend, Ginny Fitzgerald, suggests the solution for cracking the bar code and Steve and Alex are quickly led into a seamy underworld of geocashers who have settled upon the creepy idea of using corpses as a hidden treasure to be found by a small coterie of fellow geocashers with the help of their hand held GPS units. 2007, Tom Doherty Associates, 300 pages.