Kate Shugak mysteries by Dana Stabenow

[lightreads]

Hunter's Moon, Midnight Come Again, The Singing of the Dead, A Fine and Bitter Snow, A Grave Denied, A Taint in the Blood, A Deeper Sleep

Books nine through fifteen in the Kate Shugak mystery series. I've described the milieu before, so let's just shorthand to no-nonsense Alaska native private investigator living subsistance, awesome dog, murders.

I like this series because it manages slapstick commedy and painful tragedy in the same book, sometimes on the same page. There's something warm about these books, without being cloying. That all-too-rare authorial ability to deal with bloody reality without becoming uniformly, dully grim.

That continues here, as does the precise, high-relief characterization. Hunter's Moon is the most adept, to my eye -- Kate is leading a hunt for a corporate retreat that turns into a nightmare. It's compact, pithy, vividly Alaskan, funny, then frightening. The series since is still pretty good (and actually impressively developed, in some respects) but I would quibble with a number of Stabenow's choices. She totally took the coward's route in Midnight Come Again by opting to duck out of the difficult landscape of Kate's head; actually Kate doesn't even appear for the first fifty pages. And some of the crispness of the early storytelling is overcome with a less spare maturity that sprawls into sloppy structure -- the vaguely trudge-like quality of A Taint in the Blood comes to mind.

Still, I picked these books up again because I was desperately in need of stories with, you know, real people in them. And here they are, with extra color. And I still like this series to little tiny bits.

Comments

[minyan.livejournal.com]

I continue to like her a lot, and I agree with you that she's generally unflinching... and then occasionally she can duck out on you. I just listened to Play with Fire on a pretty good library tape. Kate takes on a Fundamentalist church, which you'd expect to be good, and in places it really is. The story of the way the dead man actually died is uniquely and humanly horrible and — tangible.

The odd thing about this book is that it has almost no actual mystery. We know how the man died and who killed him almost as soon as he's found, and that's about three chapters in. For the rest of the book I was waiting for something new.

I got the Fairbanks museum and the mammoth outside it, and some vivid images of Kate's days at University, where people put their shirts on when the needle falls to twenty below and Kate drops classes when professors ask her questions. But not a lot of story. It was a vivid demonstration of why plot matters. I agree with her stand against fundamentalism, and I got tired of listening to her preach it at me. She did more in one paragraph's worth of a bonfire at the end. Someone burns an ancient hunter's vest in the name of brotherly love.

She'd have done even more if she'd let the owner of that vest watch it burn, or burn himself trying to stop it, and then react. But the bonfire is worth the book, that and the character of the man who was lost and the son he left behind him, and the morel mushrooms that breed after forest fires, so I won't argue too hard.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I've probably said this before, but I recommend Breakup. It's one of hers that doesn't quite have a mystery, but it pays through in big ways anyway. I like it when she does that and makes it work in a sort of genre-defying way, though I think you're right that Play With Fire fell a bit short.