Autumn in Michigan's Upper Peninsula means hunting season, and the fall of 1950 finds most everyone in St. Adele township hunting for something—deer, grouse, uranium; love, redemption, escape; a story, a husband, a murderer…

When the son of summer residents at the exclusive Shawanok Club is found dead after an uproarious dance at the town hall, the sheriff is flummoxed, and everyone is appalled: Bambi was found in the loft over the tool shed, bound, gagged, and inexpertly scalped. Who better to search for the killer than St. Adele's reluctant constable, John McIntire?

The trail he must follow branches off like the spokes of a wheel, in multiple directions, leading to multiple dead ends. The only common link seems to be the boy's parents: a father who is mysteriously unavailable, a mother on a mission to see her son's killer dead, who remains sequestered in her rented mansion, baking cream pies and playing the piano. Her imported private eye seems more interested in dallying with McIntire's exotic Aunt Siobhan, who's just turned up on his doorstep some 25 years after she ran off with a carnival worker as a teen. And Bambi's mentor on a summer's search for uranium, a hot prospect in Flambeau County, is more conversant with archaeological artifacts than Geiger counters.

McIntire's investigation takes him from the haunts of the affluent visitors, to the backwoods camp of a Rube Goldberg hermit, and finally to an abandoned gold mine where he learns what really happened that summer's night….

Choker