Duluth's storied past holds key to mystery

In "A Defense of Detective Stories," G.K. Chesterton, an early 20th-century critic and writer, wrote that "the detective story ... is the only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life." Brian Freeman's "In the Dark," the fourth in his series featuring Jonathan Stride, the stoic head of Duluth's detective bureau, is an evocative mystery, one shaded with melancholy and dusted with heartache, and one that reminds readers that life may be brutal and cold, but, in Minnesota at least, we shore ourselves against these truths and we endure.

The question at the heart of Freeman's novel is simple: Who killed Laura Starr? But in the answering, Stride finds himself investigating a brutal murder from his own youth, one that "when he thought about who he was today, he could draw a straight line all the way back to that summer." Although Stride admits he doesn't share his memories easily, when a high school friend of his dead wife insists on the reopening of Starr's murder, like the "ore tankers shouldering through the deep water" of Lake Superior, Stride wades into his past to solve the case.

Once upon a time, Duluth was an industrial boomtown; now its waterfront is more resort than working dock, and its ships are "living dinosaurs," but for Stride it remains his home despite its failings. After his wife's death from cancer, Stride found comfort and strength in the people and places of Duluth and Superior, Wis., and the relationship Freeman creates between Stride and his environment is one of the most compelling and even lyrical aspects of this story.

In fact, the only flaw in Freeman's narrative is that he cuts into flashbacks from Stride's youth with chapters from a true crime manuscript being written by the high school friend. These chapters read like the amateur manuscript they are intended to be, but the payoff they offer in suspense doesn't equal the struggle I had with the occasional overwrought prose. I skimmed these sections to rush back to Stride and his investigation, which had all the suspense I needed.

Stride shares a cottage on Park Point with his lover, Serena, and his office at the detective bureau with his partner, Maggie, "a diminutive Chinese cop." Many of the characters in this novel are men and women you already know. They are your neighbors, your friends, the kind of people with whom you'd want to have coffee and a cruller at Grandma's.

Carole E. Barrowman teaches English at Alverno College in Milwaukee. She blogs at carolebarrowman.com