The Great Leader

Jim Harrison

Hardcover. 

Best-selling and widely beloved author Jim Harrison has won international acclaim for his masterful body of work, including Returning to Earth, Legends of the Fall, and over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.  His new novel, a blackly comic take on the detective story, Harrison delivers an enthralling tale of a retired detective in hilarious and bold pursuit of an elusive cult leader. 

Detective Sunderson has had a long career in the Michigan police--first in Detroit where what he saw stood his hair on end, and now in the Upper Peninsula where he grew up, which holds its own sorrows and horrors.  He is on the verge of retirement when he begins to investigate a hedonistic cult that has set up camp a few hours away.  There's no case to be made, and Sunderson's retirement takes place as planned, but he can't get the self-declared Great Leader off his mind.  At first, the guy seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his unlikely sixteen-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized.  Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona filled with both professional and criminal border-crossers, and on to Nebraska where the Great Leader's most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion.  But Sunderson's demons are also in pursuit of him.