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

[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.