The Trouble Up North
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year 2025
An atmospheric, haunting novel about the Sawbrooks, a family of bootleggers with a troubled history and a deep connection to the Michigan land that binds them.
The Sawbrooks have spent decades crisscrossing the waterways and vast forests between Northern Michigan and Canada to make their way as smugglers. Those hidden routes through the border's nooks and crannies are their legacy, but they no longer pay the bills. The world has changed; the resorts, with their fancy clientele, are infringing on their space, and the Sawbrooks find themselves deeply fractured, clutching at their past and the last vestiges of a once close family.
Rhoda, the tough-as-nails matriarch, is caring for her dying husband while finding herself disappointed in her three adult grandchildren. The eldest daughter, Lucy, is now a park ranger, working to federally protect the land against her mother’s will, while Buckner, the only boy, is drinking his life away. Jewell, the baby of the family, is her mother’s last hope, but when she tries to save them all in one fell swoop she becomes ensnared in a crime of escalating proportions. The Sawbrooks will have to contend with the old familial ways and the new shifting world, and face each other—and their pain-filled past—to save one of their own.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This engrossing thriller puts family ties to a terrible test. Northern Michigan’s Sawbrook family has built its legacy on shady deals, sneaking illicit goods in and out of Canada. But with resorts and casinos flooding the region, tourism’s rising tide has led to tough times for the family. And their problems run far deeper—patriarch Edward has terminal lung cancer, and his bitter wife, Rhoda, has pretty much written off their kids. When their compulsive-gambler daughter, Jewell, commits what she thinks is a minor crime, suddenly her whole family’s loyalties are put to the test. Author Travis Mulhauser has written a compelling, twisty crime caper, but the complex family dynamics, deftly drawn characters, and sharp subtext of class struggle all work on multiple levels. Emotions and risks run equally high in The Trouble Up North.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mulhauser (Sweetgirl) combines atmosphere, suspense, and deep-seated empathy in this stellar family crime saga set in northern Michigan during the early 2000s. The Sawbrooks have owned hundreds of acres along the Crow River for nearly two centuries, but the expansion of a nearby resort has led to a spike in property taxes that's put the family in financial straits. The stress comes at a difficult time for the clan: patriarch Edward is seriously ill, and his wife, Rhoda, is at odds with their addict son, Buckner, who's been banned from their property, and their older daughter, Lucy, a park ranger who put her chunk of Sawbrook land into a conservation trust against her parents' wishes. Meanwhile, the Sawbrooks' other daughter, Jewell, has agreed, for $10,000, to torch a boat so its owner can collect on a lucrative insurance policy. Jewell carries out the arson, but unexpected complications ensue, threatening her family's legacy. Mulhauser peppers the action with jaw-dropping twists, but his real strength is in constructing three-dimensional characters whose transgressions feel both plausible and shocking. Readers won't be able to put this down.
