Review by Mack Hassler
“Therefore the land mourns…
Together with the wild animals”
Hosea 4:3
This first novel by Hinman has captured my interest so completely that I do not want to stop reading. Her editor at Superior Book Productions is Tyler Tichelaar, well-known for his own many books. In fact, his work with Hinman reminds me of great editors in literature in general: Maxwell Perkins editing Thomas Wolfe and, especially when I reviewed science fiction, David Hartwell of Simon and Schuster (I knew him slightly as we went to the same college) flying to Southern California with suitcases of folders to shape up Gregory Benford,s award-winning novel Timescape (1980). As Hinman says when she thanks Tichelaar, editors can be invaluable in organizing moments in the plot and character development.
Ellie Bauer has been widowed at the age of 38 and lives alone with her female golden retriever Luna on a forty somewhere near the Marquette Airport. She is a painter with a well-stocked studio behind a log camp that she and her husband Karl had built. She lets her dog run and so now and then has to drive her SUV Explorer along the dirt roads on her property still mourning her 44-year-old dead husband, gone now a year. Karl worked in the computer industry and often had to be away flying across the country. He had had a massive heart attack on his return from one of those trips. Eventually, we learn that the trips, also, involve hacking programs and major industrial theft with what seems to be a gang of thieves stretching from New York City to Dallas. Stress and some shenanigans among his fellow bad guys caused his cardiac arrest.
At the start of her narrative (nothing fancy in point of view. Tichelaar just has her tell her story), Ellie is out in her SUV looking for her dog when she spots strange men with New York accents in a clearing clubbing one of their number. She watches carefully and does not want to call the dog for fear of drawing the attention of the bad guys. They dig a shallow trench and push their victim into it, cover him with dirt loosely, and wound him to unconsciousness with a gun equipped with a silencer. Ellie learns later that the silencer had, also killed her dog who had come to find her. She uses the trench to bury Luna. Very touching, I cried.
Before that , however, Ellie uses Yooper sisu and resourcefulness to uncover the poor guy buried alive; and with a clever combination of ratchets and a sled and ladder from Karl’s workshop (she is not just a fine painter but a strong Yoper gal) and gets him back to her log camp. She treats him and nurses him toward recovery. She sees on the news that he is a “teacher of the year” from the Bronx, New York, named Evan. Once he gets hos strength back, they have a lot of good sex and begin to share their histories. Evan had been involved with the hacking and industrial theft and with the “bad guys”, in particular with Murphy, the one with the gun who had killed Elli’s poor dog.
The plot becomes even more complex as Ellie and Evan avoid the gang—especially a new little villain named Rory, who is nearly comic in his peskiness. The narrative is nicely structured and filled with character types, and it does not have the huge philosophic ideas of Timescape. It is a gripping story of human criminality and human strength. We hope to see a lot more from Jodi Hinman.
The Hole They Dug for You, by Jodi M Hinman (Superior Book Productions, Marquette MI, 2025), 234 pages, pdk, n.p.
