McKnight Will See a New Day

Back in 2016, after he broke away from his longtime publisher, Minotaur, in order to sign with G.P. Putnam’s Sons and launch a new thriller series starring prisoner-turned-assassin Nick Mason, I asked author Steve Hamilton whether this meant he was abandoning his original series protagonist, reluctant detective Alex McKnight, after 10 books. “Alex will definitely be back,” Hamilton averred. “I can’t imagine ever not wanting to know what he’s doing next. He was there from the beginning, and in a way I owe everything to him. When the next McKnight book does come out, I think readers can expect the series to be revitalized, while still retaining everything they loved about this character in the first place, just like I did.”

So I am pleased to read, in The Real Book Spy, that Hamilton has another McKnight novel due out this coming September: Dead Man Running (Putnam)—the first new entry in that northern Michigan-set series since 2013’s Let It Burn. Here’s the official plot brief:

On the Mediterranean Sea, a vacationer logs onto the security camera feed from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Something about his living room seems not quite right—the room is bright, when he’s certain he’d left the curtains closed. Rewinding through the feed, he sees an intruder. When he shifts to the bedroom camera, he sees the dead body.

Martin T. Livermore is the key suspect in the abduction and murder of at least five women, but he’s never been this sloppy before. When the FBI finally catches him in Scottsdale, he declares he’ll only talk to one person: a retired police officer from Detroit, now a private investigator living in the tiny town of Paradise, Michigan. A man named Alex McKnight.

Livermore means nothing to McKnight, but it soon becomes clear McKnight means something to Livermore … and that Livermore’s capture was only the beginning of an elaborate, twisted plot with McKnight at the center. In a hunt that will take him across the country and to the edge of his limits, McKnight fights to stop a vicious killer before he can exact his ultimate revenge. And his grand finale will cut closer to home than he ever could have imagined.

Meanwhile, I understand Hamilton’s third Nick Mason outing, An Honorable Assassin—which was originally slated to appear next month—has now been pushed back for release in May 2019.