The opening chapter reintroduces us to Corso and his photographer and former lover, Meg Dougherty, in Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Corso is trying to keep one step ahead of a warrant to appear before a Texas grand jury, and the upper Midwest has locked down under a blizzard. He decides to rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle and to drive to the nearest open airport, in Madison, Wisconsin. But he and Dougherty never make it to Madison. Instead, they crash in a small town called Aurora, and they barely escape freezing to death by burning all the wood that can be pried loose from an abandoned farmhouse and its outbuildings.

Under the floorboards of one shed, Corso finds the remains of the family that had lived in the house fifteen years earlier. Everyone had thought that they had simply left town. But they're all there, wrapped in plastic under the floorboards--all of them, that is, except for the mother.

To find her and to find out why she killed her family, Corso and Dougherty have to dig through the strange and violent past that she has taken great pains to bury. Their investigation takes them from Wisconsin to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to the Rampalo Hills of northwestern New Jersey, and then to Midland, Michigan. This is a story of hillbilly strangeness with a multicultural twist, a deftly crafted narrative that bridges the genres represented by Deliverance and Silence of the Lambs.

Ford is the author of another, highly successful series featuring Seattle private investigator, Leo Waterman. But, whereas that series exploits Waterman's sense of place and community and has many wryly humorous elements, from Waterman's own stream of wisecracks to his use of the homeless as informants, the novels featuring Corso are almost manically peripatetic (much like Lee Child's novels featuring Jack Reacher), and they are more ironic than humorous - more likely to produce a hard smirk than a bellylaugh. In some instances, Ford produces sentences that seem meant for a Bartlett's Quotations of the hardboiled and noir. For instance, as the story approaches its climax, Dougherty snaps at Corso: "'Don't say that. . . . I start hearing a guy with a death wish saying he's scared, it makes me nervous.”

With A Blind Eye, Ford continues to demonstrate his range and his considerable skills as a novelist. Beyond the numbing description of the blizzard, he sets each scene with succinct descriptions of the small details that, in real life, generate a person's sense of a place much more often than some broad impression does so. For instance, about a third of the way into the novel, Corso and Dougherty walk up to what was once a convent-school: "Overhead, the trees circling Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow's driveway swayed like ghostly dancers. The circular drive hadn't seen a car in ages. The bricks were littered with dead leaves, acorns, and small shards of broken branches. The untended flower beds, grown tall in the summer sun, were bent double now, their brown stalks cracked and frozen in place. The wind carried the fecund odor of mold and decay and death."

Ford strikes an almost perfect balance between description and dialogue, between action and the revelation and consideration of information. There is a large cast of minor characters that keep the story moving, geographically and narratively. Each character is efficiently and effectively individualized, physically and psychologically. Ford manages to suggest complexities that exist beyond the scope of the story and seldom sketches these characters as caricatures. From a sheriff who is worn out by her responsibilities and yet desperate to be reelected, to a community college professor who has seemingly given up on ambition and love but cherishes the memory of both, most of these characters are interesting beyond what they bring to the story's plot. The one notable exception may be Tommie de Groot, whose situation turns out to be much more complex than his personality.

Interspersed throughout the novel are brief, first-person passages told from an unnamed young woman's point of view. It is one of the nicer touches in this very well-written novel that the young woman turns out not to be at all whom the reader may have expected, and this revelation adds not just a further turn to the novel's resolution but a significant dimension to the novel's themes.

This series looks to have a long future. The one risk to that longevity may be in the punishment that Corso takes. If this novel is ever filmed and the actor playing Corso is presented true to the book, the big bandage over Jack Nicholson's nose in most of Chinatown is going to seem, comparatively, like a small distraction. As James Crumley has discovered in his books featuring C. W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch, protagonists who endure much more punishment than most men can take start to seem a little cartoonish, and the delighted suspension of disbelief devolves to, at best, bemused disbelief.

--Martin Kich