A Venture Into Murder — Henry Kisor

A Venture into Murder, the second whodunit in Henry Kisor's Steve Martinez series, begins in Porcupine County, nestled in the peaceful landscape of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In it lies a small town where the people all know one another and gossip cannot be silenced for long. But there's one secret that a certain resident has tried to keep quiet for years . . . and those who try to uncover it seem to wind up dead. Deputy Steve Martinez -- Lakota Sioux by birth, white Easterner by upbringing -- lost his heart to the region after running away from a secret of his own. After finding the love of his life, Steve was able to make peace with his past and take comfort in the land that once had been so good to his ancestors. The peaceful quiet is broken, though, after a mob hit man's corpse washes up on the shore of Lake Superior. Then, during a routine police operation, one of Steve's colleagues literally falls over the long-buried body of one of Porcupine County's missing persons . . . a man who had been last seen alive over one hundred years before. The two deaths are seemingly unrelated at first. Anxious to uncover the truth surrounding these deaths, Steve probes deeper, through shoot-outs and hair-raising flights in the sheriff's small plane, willing to do whatever it takes to keep the peace in the land he loves, but he may find that -- even in the quietest of towns -- some things are better left buried.