Nobody Touches the Kettle

About this book

For twenty-three years the Kettle has sat on the frozen millpond of Esker, Michigan, steaming at body temperature, and nobody has been able to touch it except Tully Saari, born four minutes after it landed. She is the Hand of Esker, and the whole little Finnish-American town on Lake Superior lives on her palm: the pilgrims, the motel, her mother's sauna house. Then, twelve days before the solstice vigil, Len Aho, the Kettle's gruff old custodian, is found dead at dawn, sitting against it with his bare hand flat on its skin. The coroner calls it a slip on the ice. But the Kettle has changed, a young federal reviewer has just arrived to renew the town's licence, and Len's last text to Tully says only: It's about you. Told one day at a time, backwards, this is the story of how Esker got to the strangest night it has ever known.