Kate Shugak mysteries
Sep. 19th, 2006 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsA Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, Dead in the Water, and A Cold-Blooded Business by Dana Stabenow
Kate Shugak is an Alaskan Aleut living in an arctic national park, a former investigator for the Alaska District Attorney, and now something of a freelancer. To paraphrase the nonfictional Kate who pointed me in the direction of these books, Kate Shugak is wounded and intense and competent, unimpressed with anyone’s self-importance, hard to drag away from her cabin and her kitchen and her half-wolfhalf-deaf companion, Mutt. And she also solves crime.
Oh, lovely. These tiny novels evoke Alaska with broad but compelling strokes. The landscape, weather, wildlife, history, and politics sometimes feel like characters themselves, a few among the surprisingly large supporting cast of fishers and trappers and racers and natives and outsiders and addicts (and disabled people!). The mysteries are also creative -- A Fatal Thaw, which is ostensibly about Kate tracking the shooter of a local girl, plays with genre conventions in nifty ways that I won’t spoil for you. Dead in the Water takes Kate onto a crabber up in the Aleutians, and A Cold-Blooded Business sends her much farther north to the slopes of the Prudhoe oil field to find the source of a massive drug problem.
And I think that’s what I really like here -- A Cold-Blooded Business is about a native Alaskan’s view of the oil drilling and, as most of the books are to some degree or other, also about the plague of substance abuse which is still raging through the state’s communities, native and otherwise. And it’s quite a funny book. I kid you not. There’s a gritty sort of charm here, and a surprising sense of whimsy. There’s also a stark but compassionate portrait of a native community looking uncertainly into the future and drinking itself to sleep every night, of its confused and angry children, of cruelty and evil. Somehow, making these things co-exist works, and works well.
Stabenow does stumble, as we all do, most notably with an over reliance on dated cultural references as character descriptors, and an occasional misjudgment of a detail that left me snorting rather than touched or impressed (your heroine really should not tack her letter of resignation to her boss’s door with the bloody knife which had been used to cut her own throat. I mean, really). But these are great, compact, rich stories, and I’m simply delighted to have them sent my way.
Kate Shugak is an Alaskan Aleut living in an arctic national park, a former investigator for the Alaska District Attorney, and now something of a freelancer. To paraphrase the nonfictional Kate who pointed me in the direction of these books, Kate Shugak is wounded and intense and competent, unimpressed with anyone’s self-importance, hard to drag away from her cabin and her kitchen and her half-wolf
Oh, lovely. These tiny novels evoke Alaska with broad but compelling strokes. The landscape, weather, wildlife, history, and politics sometimes feel like characters themselves, a few among the surprisingly large supporting cast of fishers and trappers and racers and natives and outsiders and addicts (and disabled people!). The mysteries are also creative -- A Fatal Thaw, which is ostensibly about Kate tracking the shooter of a local girl, plays with genre conventions in nifty ways that I won’t spoil for you. Dead in the Water takes Kate onto a crabber up in the Aleutians, and A Cold-Blooded Business sends her much farther north to the slopes of the Prudhoe oil field to find the source of a massive drug problem.
And I think that’s what I really like here -- A Cold-Blooded Business is about a native Alaskan’s view of the oil drilling and, as most of the books are to some degree or other, also about the plague of substance abuse which is still raging through the state’s communities, native and otherwise. And it’s quite a funny book. I kid you not. There’s a gritty sort of charm here, and a surprising sense of whimsy. There’s also a stark but compassionate portrait of a native community looking uncertainly into the future and drinking itself to sleep every night, of its confused and angry children, of cruelty and evil. Somehow, making these things co-exist works, and works well.
Stabenow does stumble, as we all do, most notably with an over reliance on dated cultural references as character descriptors, and an occasional misjudgment of a detail that left me snorting rather than touched or impressed (your heroine really should not tack her letter of resignation to her boss’s door with the bloody knife which had been used to cut her own throat. I mean, really). But these are great, compact, rich stories, and I’m simply delighted to have them sent my way.