The Great Leader
A Novel
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3.9 • 20 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A wild ride . . . [and] a thoroughly enjoyable tale of religion, sex and money . . . this is not your grandfather’s detective novel.” —Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times
New York Times–bestselling 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. In this enthralling, witty, and expertly crafted novel, he follows one man on a hunt for an elusive cult founder, dubbed “The Great Leader.”
On the verge of retirement, Detective Sunderson begins to investigate a hedonistic cult, which has set up camp near his home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his 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 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.
“Jim Harrison is unsurpassed at chronicling man’s relationship with wilderness . . . The Great Leader is hugely enjoyable.” —Tom Bissell, Outside Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison (The English Teacher) offers a chunk of comic backwoods noir marked by more plodding than stalking. Detective Sunderson wallows in "the deep puzzlement of retirement" even as he pursues, on his own dime, a pedophilic cult leader. Known simply as "Dwight," the quarry promises to unknot for Sunderson the bedeviling connections between sex, religion, and money. But Dwight barely appears on the page, leaving the detective often ruminating on his own distrust of money and spirituality, and obsessing about sex which he actually gets a fair amount of for an overweight, drunk, sardonic, 64-year-old bachelor, despite his belief that the "biological imperative was a distracting nuisance." Characters and themes like these pervade the prolific Harrison's work; no one makes horny geezers so lovable, but some will wish he'd distilled this into the novella form he's so good at. The story's motifs of lust and power, sex and death resonate, yet the narrative's slow progression keeps an otherwise entertaining literary investigation rooted in the oft-frozen ground of the Upper Peninsula.
