Wolf Hour

In October 2016 in Minneapolis, a series of murders unfolds against a backdrop of gang violence, gun culture, and personal grief. Six years later, in September 2022, Norwegian writer Holger Rudi arrives in the city to research a true-crime book about these events. Holger frames the story by visiting key locations and imaginatively inhabiting the perspectives of those involved. The narrative alternates between his present-day investigations and the 2016 events, told from multiple viewpoints including that of the killer.

The story begins when a figure at a sixth-floor window in the Jordan projects, a deteriorating public housing neighborhood, shoots Marco Dante, a flamboyant gun dealer who had sold the shooter an M24 sniper rifle and two hand grenades only days before. The shot hits Dante in the stomach, and a neighbor drags him inside before a second shot can be fired. The shooter, identified through surveillance as a Latino man named Tomás Gomez, cleans the apartment, gives a yucca plant to an elderly neighbor, then walks downtown to buy a dwarf pufferfish, a species noted for being extremely poisonous.

Detective Bob Oz, a 40-year-old homicide investigator, is called to the scene. Bob is in free fall: separated from his wife Alice, a psychologist, he has been spiraling into heavy drinking and reckless behavior. The shooter's apartment is empty, but Bob finds an insulin prescription for Tomás Gomez, an empty rifle case, and a business card for Mike Lunde at Town Taxidermy. Detective Kay Myers, Bob's most trusted colleague and a disciplined Black woman from Englewood, Chicago, helps canvass the neighborhood. A doctor who prescribed Gomez's insulin reveals that Gomez has gang tattoos, including an X-11 symbol and a wolf.

Superintendent Brenton Walker suspends Bob after he savagely beats Tony Stärk, a man who comes to the station accusing Bob of raping his wife. Bob's volatility stems from devastating trauma: his three-year-old daughter Frankie found his service pistol in a bedroom drawer and accidentally killed herself. The tragedy destroyed his marriage and left him unable to carry a gun.

Working unofficially, Bob visits Town Taxidermy and meets its owner, Mike Lunde, a gentle, balding man who claims to know Gomez as more than a customer. Mike tells Bob that Gomez's wife and two children were killed in a gang shootout at a McDonald's restaurant, with his daughter dying in his arms after being shot in her wheelchair. The teenage shooters wore X-11 jackets. Bob also interrogates an X-11 drug dealer who identifies Gomez as "Lobo," a feared enforcer from the 1990s who carried out brutal attacks on rival gangs before being expelled when his violence became bad for business.

Bob begins spending long hours at the taxidermy store, finding the atmosphere restorative. He and Mike develop a friendship rooted in conversation about loneliness and loss. Bob confides the truth about Frankie's death, and Mike gently suggests Bob is angry not because Alice left but because she found happiness.

A second murder follows: Cody Karlstad, a local National Rifle Association (NRA) spokesman, is shot through his windshield from a parking garage roof. Bob and Kay connect the cases: Dante sold illegal weapons, and Karlstad campaigned for gun rights. The killer appears to be targeting people linked to gun culture.

Running parallel to the investigation, Detective Olav Hanson, a bitter, aging colleague, receives a threatening call from a gang leader known as Die Man. Thirty years earlier, Hanson, whom Die Man calls "Milkman," accepted payments to misdirect murder investigations. Now Die Man demands Hanson kill Gomez before police capture him and expose them both.

Police chase "Gomez" through Track Plaza, a downtown shopping mall, where the suspect escapes through a ventilation shaft. A subsequent pursuit near the Rialto, a pornographic movie theatre, yields only a mistaken sighting. Each time, "Gomez" vanishes through careful misdirection. Kay identifies the escalating pattern and concludes Mayor Kevin Patterson, who is about to open the NRA's annual conference at the US Bank Stadium, is the next target.

The central revelation arrives through two simultaneous discoveries. Kay treks to a property in Cedar Creek forest and finds the Rogue Taxidermy Club, where a locked booth labeled "Emily Lunde" contains a frozen male body strapped to a chair, its face and hands skinned off. Meanwhile, Bob cross-references a 1986 multiple homicide with Mike's story and discovers the victims' surname is not Gomez but Lunde. Mike's wife Monica, his son Sam, and his daughter Anna were the ones killed.

At Mike's home in the suburb of Chanhassen, Bob meets Emily Lunde, Mike's sister, who uses a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis. Upstairs, he finds a face mask made from Tomás Gomez's flayed skin, matching gloves bearing Gomez's tattoo, and brown contact lenses. The frozen body at Cedar Creek is the real Tomás Gomez, also known as Lobo. Mike kills him, skins his face and hands, and wears them as a disguise. Every fingerprint at every crime scene belongs to the real Gomez; when police search for a Latino suspect, Mike simply removes the disguise and walks away unnoticed.

Emily tells Bob that Mike has left for the store with a rifle to "unveil his masterpiece." At Town Taxidermy, Mike holds Jill Patterson, the mayor's wife, and her two children as hostages. They have come to collect their stuffed Labrador retriever. Mike shoots a bodyguard who tries to breach the door. Bob arrives, removes his coat, and walks unarmed into the store.

Inside, Mike explains he never intended to kill the family. They are there to demonstrate that they could have been killed "by a depressed, free citizen with access to weapons." Each of his killings targets a link in the chain that destroyed his own family: the gunman Gomez, the dealer Dante, the NRA activist Karlstad, the corrupt detective Hanson, whose headless body is found mounted on a sculpture that morning, and the gang leader Die Man, poisoned with the pufferfish's tetrodotoxin at the Rialto. Bob persuades Mike to release the hostages, offering himself in exchange, and cuts them free.

Alone, Mike places the rifle under his chin and asks Bob to help him pull the trigger. Bob whispers his daughter's name. A single shot rings out. SWAT storms in to find Mike dead and Bob in the doorway.

In the aftermath, Walker rescinds Bob's suspension. Kay confronts FBI agent Ted Springer for wanting SWAT to kill Lunde rather than allow a captured figure to broadcast his message, and she is later promoted to head the Homicide Unit. Bob begins a relationship with Liza, the bartender at Bernie's Bar who became his confidante during the case, and leaves the police for corporate security work. Dante, discharged from the hospital, is killed by a booby trap Mike rigged using the two hand grenades from the opening chapters.

In September 2022, Holger meets Bob at Town Taxidermy, now run by a young taxidermist. Bob says he was not afraid during the final standoff, that the silence was "like in a church." Holger reflects on Jack London's idea that fiction is truer than fact and concludes that telling stories "is probably the only thing that gives any meaning."