THE GREAT LEADER: A FAUX MYSTERY

Best-selling and beloved 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 his newest and most original work to date, Harrison delivers an enthralling, witty, and expertly crafted novel that follows one man’s hunt for an elusive cult leader, dubbed the Great Leader. Detective Sunderson is on the verge of retirement when he 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 unlikely 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 that is filled with professional and criminal border-crossers, then 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. Rich with character and incredibly funny, Jim Harrison’s The Great Leader is at once a gripping excursion through America’s landscapes and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love, and his own darker nature.