Less than a Treason

Starred review from March 20, 2017
Edgar-winner Stabenow’s richly nuanced, highly entertaining 21st Kate Shugak mystery (after 2013’s Bad Blood) finds the Alaskan PI, who’s recovering from a gunshot wound she suffered months before, enjoying her solitude at her isolated cabin at the foot of the Quilak Mountains when some unwelcome visitors, who call themselves “orienteers,” pass by. One of them, a woman whose looks remind Kate of Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, seeks Kate’s aid after she tumbles off a ridge—and falls on a heap of human bones. The intrepid Kate packs up the scanty remains, which a variety of animals have picked clean, and heads for the nearest town. Soon a woman hires Kate to find her missing husband, and the plot goes off in some surprising directions from there. The book is sprinkled with wit, studded with exquisite descriptions of the rugged landscape, and filled with opinionated and endearing characters, including reality TV show producers, park rangers, geologists, and barkeeps. The dialogue is smart, authentic, and reminiscent of Elmore Leonard, had he trained his shrewdly ironic eye on the wilds of Alaska rather than the seamier side of Detroit. A line from a Robert Frost poem provided the title.

Starred review from May 1, 2017
When Aleut PI Kate Shugak is shot in the chest at close range, trooper Jim Chopin, her lover, is wracked with guilt for not killing her assailant sooner. The next day Kate leaves the hospital, against medical advice, to heal alone for four months and rebuild a remote cabin, while Jim constructs an airstrip and hangar. When human bones are found near her retreat, Kate returns to Niniltna, where most locals thought she was dead, and resumes working. A woman hires Kate to find her missing geologist husband, and a day later the woman is found dead. Shortly after that, a colleague of the missing man also is killed. When Kate and Jim reconnect (two-thirds through the book, but worth waiting for), they look for what's behind all the killing and find that the Chicago Mob has tentacles stretching even into remote Alaska. Starting a Kate Shugak book is like going somewhere everybody knows your name, given the warmth and familiarity of the Niniltna cast, even to readers new to the series. The twenty-first series installment, this sequel to Bad Blood (2013) maintains Stabenow's reputation for concise prose, pithy dialogue, full-bodied characters, and intriguing plotting. Crime fiction doesn't get much better than this.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)