The Hunting Wind

This weekend I finished the third Alex McKnight book, The Hunting Wind (See my comments on the second one here.) Hamilton has been breaking the "rules" through the series (climax in the middle of the novel, climactic moments off-screen, etc), and keeps it up here. The book starts without much a mystery (an old friend of Alex's wants to track down an old girlfriend), and the stakes don't really go up toward near the end. And, at the end, we're left with no resolution of one of the central pieces of the book -- why does Alex's friend want to track her down?

In some novels, this would be a weakness -- after all, we're talking about the motivations of a central character. But here, Hamilton has made the friend both very appealing (we want to think he's a good guy), and at the same time seemingly amoral. I think that the answer to the motivation question depends on the reader's view of human nature -- how cynically we view these characters. And, to me, that's a real achievement that mysteries don't often have -- making central characters so ambiguous, but strongly drawn at the same time.