Simon Sunderson, newly retired as a Michigan State Police detective and still mourning the divorce that had "blown a three-year long bomb crater" in his life, decides to devote himself to tracking down the Great Leader, the head of a tiny cult created to satisfy his lust for adolescent girls.
Sunderson's Ahab-like quest takes him from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the Arizona/Mexico border to Nebraska's lonely, beautiful sandhills. Along the way he drinks too much, overindulges in the local cuisine (a Mexican breakfast dish that features tripe is one of his favorites) and pines for both his ex-wife, Diane, and his nubile next-door neighbor, 16-year-old Mona, whose skill with computers lands her a job as computer illiterate Sunderson's assistant.
Though the ex-detective's frequently shambling pursuit of the cult leader provides the novel's narrative momentum, Harrison's complex, appealing, if obviously flawed protagonist is the essence of the story's true pleasure: "Life moment by moment is so unforgiving," Sunderson muses in one of his many moments of pained reflection, "and I'm a slow study." Telling someone he's "investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex," Sunderson, an avid student of history, spends plenty of time pondering those elemental subjects, alongside the pure joy of fishing for brook trout in a fast-running stream or the mysteries of Native American ritual. He's a cynic, who's spent "forty years as a janitor trying to clean up the culture's dirt," and yet he's capable of drawing others to himself in a meaningful ways.
It's possible to enjoy The Great Leader as a detective story but even more so as an exploration of one man's wounded psyche. Though he's been writing for a long time, Jim Harrison's latest leaves no doubt he still has much that's fresh, entertaining and thoughtful to say. --Harvey Freedenberg