BLOOD UP NORTH

In this novel, a woman gets drawn into a criminal conspiracy by her wayward brother and must confront her family’s troubled past.

Cass Schmidt lives with her grandmother Tilly in the woods of Backus, Minnesota. Cass is haunted by twin sources of shame: her crushing poverty and her family’s ignominious past checkered with criminality. Her brother, Jack, shows up suddenly with a bag filled with money and buries it on Tilly’s property—he won’t divulge the details of the trouble he’s in, but Cass can only assume it’s deep. Then, Danny and Jesse, two of her cousins, the sons of her uncle George Bloom, a corrupt cop, show up. They are willing to resort to violence against her and Tilly to find the money and Jack. Cass learns that Jack stole the money from Harold Frost, a brutal drug dealer, but the details remain obscure. Her father, Vick, offers to help, but she hears rumors he might be in on the burglary, and he’s a reprobate criminal. In addition, he was a miserable father, and she suspects he might be responsible in some way for the death of her mother, Suzanne. Soukup deftly captures the desperation of Cass’ life, one that seems doomed from the start: “Her greatest fear had always been that she, too, would become another of the universe’s endless victims, not by misfortune, not by her own undoing, but by the sheer anonymity that is the universe’s might, this planet a belligerent rock hurled from its own apostatic hand, without impetus, without end.” His writing is gritty and authentic—the dialogue rings unerringly true—but it also achieves a poetic luminosity. Further, the taut tension that forms the narrative backbone of the plot never loosens for a moment. The author has composed a remarkable anatomy of a world caught in the grip of a vise—pulverized by the pressure of the past and a hopelessness about the future.

A moving and psychologically astute crime drama.