Family Trees — Dean L. Hovey

Northeastern Minnesota Book Award winner! On her sixteenth birthday Margaret Lane is put on a train to Pine County after graduation from the Minnesota State School. Her work as an indentured servant at the Tuxedo Inn leads to an encounter with gangsters, a job at the Pokegama Sanatorium, and her eventual disappearance from all public records. Years later Barb Skog, the assistant director of the DEA hits a genealogical dead end and asks the Pine County Sheriff for assistance in finding her missing Aunt Margaret. Although an eco-protest in the Nemadji State Forest has turned deadly, naked Rainbow World people are hindering the search for evidence at a campground, and the Mille Lacs Chippewa are scheduling news conferences, the sheriff is persuaded to assign Sergeant Floyd Swenson, his cold case expert, to investigate Margaret Lane's decades-old disappearance. In Family Trees, Hovey weaves threads of Minnesota's history together with an investigation of a present-day mystery, and as the pattern begins to form a whole he proves once again Faulkner's adage: "The past in never dead. It's not even past." Mike Gainor, The Pine City Pioneer