A STOLEN SEASON

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has seen its share of iron winters—in 1995, it snowed six feet in a single day—but this one feels, as one depressed party puts it, like “something in the air is just plain broken.”

Maybe that’s because lovely Natalie Reynaud is no longer around to provide warmth and comfort for ex-cop Alex McKnight. Having used up her sick leave, she’s gone back to Canada to resume her own police work, leaving her lover bereft and bemused. Alex (Ice Run, 2004, etc.) doesn’t quite know what to make of Natalie. Will she become a fixture in his life? Does she want to? Is she as uncertain about that as he is? Meanwhile, thank heaven, there are distractions. Three men in a Chris-Craft manage to slam it into an abandoned railroad bridge, totaling the boat and nearly themselves, if it weren’t for Alex and friends. And yet it’s a rescue evoking scant gratitude. These are hard guys working for bottom-feeders, connected to the kind of sleazy operation that has grief written all over it. Before it plays itself out, the price to Alex will be violence and bloodletting and bitter loss.

The cast is strong and the local color vivid as ever, but this time, the plot has the phoned-in feel of characters in search of a story.