#1536. A Cold Day For Murder by Dana Stebanow

Murders in the tropics or in the Alaskan interior both need to be solved. Kate Shugak is an Alaskan native who left (betrayed?) her ancestors by attending college and then law school to join the district attorney’s office in Anchorage. Roughly a year or so ago, the resolution of a case sent Kate back to live deep into the Alaskan wilderness where she shares a small but mostly comfortable cabin with her dog Mutt. The “Park”, roughly 4X the size of Denali, is home to a small and scattered population of highly protective Alaskan natives. They certainly don’t appreciate it when Outsiders (defined as anyone who doesn’t live within the boundary of The Park) try to tell them how to live and manage The Park.

A new-ish Ranger from Ohio has been making noises about expanding the few roads within The Park to make it more accessible to tourists (and the $$$ tourists spend). Locals disagree. After a local council meeting with the townspeople, the Ranger disappears. By the time the book opens, he’s been missing for 8 weeks. And his daddy, an Ohio congressman, has squeezed the FBI to investigate. DC calls the Anchorage office who gets an investigator from the District Attorney’s office to look into the missing son/ranger.

That was two weeks ago and now he’s missing, too. The DA’s office knows Kate lives in the Park and sends someone to convince her to start asking questions, which she begrudgingly accepts. The trail goes all over the area local to the disappearances. Family, friends, drunks, poachers, Outsiders, and Park hermits show up in various situations, mostly with an alibi.

Stebanow has been reviewed by us here at MRB. She’s an Edgar Award winner who lives on the border between civilization and the Alaskan bush. Her stories are direct and quick. I’m not sure if the quick read is because her books aren’t all that long or because she’s such a good writer that the time passes quickly. One of the terrific selling points is the way she manages to make the Alaskan wilderness a vital character of the story. Sort of how George Pelacanos makes Washington, DC a vital plot element in his books.

Pick up most any Kate Shugak books to be transported to a world most of us will never get to because that land is just so remote. Add that to a story web that has multiple criss-cross trails, enough to make you run out of fuel from all the running around on her Arctic Cat snowmobile.

 

 East Coast Don

Any Taint of Vice by Dana Stebenow

Kate Shugak is the Alaska PI of 20 novels by Stebenow. Don’t remember how I got hold of this one as it’s been on my Kindle for some time. Not a full novel, rather it’s a Kindle Single. And a satisfying one at that.

A straight-forward missing person case where the son of the local college honcho has disappeared. Singles by their nature have to be pretty linear with few detours. Collect a few clues, toss the bogus ones, solve. Done. Readable over your morning coffee or afternoon tea, whichever is your preference.

East Coast Don

 

A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stebenow

I'd read one other book by this Alaskan author that while good, didn't quite grab me. I was hoping for an Inuit version of Tony Hillerman who would weave Alaskan legend into her books like Hillerman tapped the heritage of the Navajo. It just didn't do it for me. Maybe I should learn and not start in the middle of an author's long series of stories about the same character (there are about 20 Kate Shugak books). So, courtesy of West Coast Don's Kindle archive, I grabbed this, the first Kate Shugak book.

A little backstory. Kate (of the Shugak tribe, if I read it right) lives way the hell out in a national park on 160 acres with her half wolf, Mutt. No neighbors (of the two legged variety) are within miles. Drives a souped up snowmobile. Used to be an investigator for the Anchorage D.A. mostly doing cases on domestic or child abuse. One case got her throat partially slit and damaged her vocal cords. That was the case that send her off to the wilderness. Grizzlies were safer than deranged parents.

The park has a new ranger on staff, kid named Miller (whose daddy happens to be in Congress) full of ideas about the park belonging to the people and should be opened up more for the public. The locals don't agree. After a public hearing and then a fight in the local bar, Miller disappears. An investigator from Anchorage goes looking and he disappears, too. Not hearing from his son, Miller the elder has the FBI check it out, the FBI talks to the Anchorage DA who calls on Kate, who reluctantly agrees (for $400 a day plus expenses).

Not being too many people in the booming town of Niniltna, Kate talks to her grandmother, surrogate father, a former beau, the park staff, the barkeeper, her cousin; just about everybody. And someone was taking a few pot shots at her, mostly as target practice because everyone up there can dang well shoot a rifle - sort of required when the noise outside could just as well be a bear as a neighbor.

This was the first in the Kate Shugak series. According to her website (and a very entertaining blog), this book was misplaced in her father's garage for two years before getting it to a publisher. And guess what . . . turned out to be an Edgar award winner. So maybe I had been too harsh. Had I started with this one, I might have plowed along with other of her Shugak titles. Standard detective fare, yes, but  told in the harsh light (or darkness) of an Alaskan winter while giving us a taste of the quirks and peculiarities of the Alaskan mindset and behaviors. The TV show Northern Exposure was about a fish out of water living amongst a bunch of unique characters. Stebenow gives us more of a gut check about what is like way back in the wilderness of Alaska; the good and the not so good.

East Coast Don

A Grave Denied by Dana Stabenow

I picked up A Grave Denied at the library for my trip to India, but didn't get around to reading it until returning home. The back cover blurb said it was based in The Park up in Alaska, so after having just read The Final Frontiersman based up in Alaska, I thought it was worth a shot. This is one part of a long series of mysteries based around a sort of lady PI up there named Kate Shugak who used to work sex crimes for the Anchorage police.

It's spring, the weather has moderated and the middle/high school kids are on a field trip up to study a local glacier. While exploring, 2 of the kids wander into a cave in the glacier and find a body with a huge shotgun hole in his chest. This starts a chain of events involving numerous characters from the small town near The Park called Niniltna. The stiff is a local handyman, Len, and Kate is asked by a suitor-wanna-be state policeman, Jim Chopin to do a little digging into guy's last known sightings. So she slowly traces out the last jobs he had done for the locals. Along the way, Kate's house gets torched in an attempt to get her off the case. The son of a Tribal boss, called Dandy (who wants to get on the police force) also goes out asking questions. Following a lead to Anchorage, Kate stumbles onto a teenager with all the signs of prior abuse. A little more digging shows that the Len was living under an alias and did a prior prison term as a sex offender. Not long after, Dandy is found dead of the same shotgun blast. Kate is sure that the girl's dad was the killer.

A back story has Kate caring for the teenage son of a deceased policeman/lover (the kid found the body). Johnny has struck up a developing friendship with Vanessa whose parents were dead and now living with some cousins old enough to be her grandparents. On a hunch, Kate goes back out to their homestead because the stiff had done some work out there and Kate was wondering if Vanessa might also have been molested.

The 'mom', Telma, is really screwed up. A passive, cookie baking nutcase. The 'dad', Virgil, worships the ground she walks on and is very protective of her. When Kate arrives, Virgil takes her down with a shovel and tries to bury her in the garden. Turns out ol' Telma had/has a serious case of post partum depression and killed all 5 babies she bore out there in the boondocks. Loyal and loving Virgil buried them all in their garden. During a job for Virgil, Len discovered the backyard cemetery and thinks he can blackmail Virgil for some money. After a few months of payments, Virgil ends the agreement with extreme prejudice and deposits Len in the glacier. Jim Chopin follows Kate to Virgil's place, finds him in the process of burying Kate and manages to subdue Virgil, finally wrapping up the case. In the end, the community all comes together and, in an Alaskan version of Extreme Homemaker, build Kate and Johnny a new house.

I thought this was pretty good. Kate is a heroine anyone could get behind. The story was well plotted with enough twists to keep me interested. I was kind of hoping for sort of an Alaskan Tony Hillerman who became famous for his weaving of Navaho culture into traditional mysteries, but sad to say, she is no Hillerman. This tale could have taken place anywhere, but would have been way more interesting with local culture being as critical to the story as the crime. While I did enjoy the story, I'm not sure at this point when I might venture back into Kate Shugak's neighborhood, but I might.

East Coast Don