Showing results by author "Dana Stabenow" in All Categories

From the palaces of Alexandria reigns Cleopatra – seventh of her name, avatar of the goddess Isis, ruler of the Kingdom of Egypt – surrounded by riches untold. Through the streets of her great city bustle scholars and sailors, politicians and priests. For those with the means, it is a comfortable life. But not all are invited to share in the wealth of Egypt's first city. When Herminia, one of Alexandria's most beloved actresses, disappears on the eve of a great performance, Cleopatra sets Tetisheri, her Eye, to investigate.

Edgar-award winning author Dana Stabenow is best known for her Kate Shugak novels, but the unifying protagonist of almost all her writing - be it crime, fantasy, horror, or science fiction - is Alaska. This genre-spanning collection of 16 short stories features familiar characters like Kate and Jim, Liam and Wy, and Bill and Moses, but also ranges farther afield than many listeners will expect.

Alexandria, 47BC. Cleopatra – seventh of her name, avatar of the goddess Isis, ruler of the Kingdom of Egypt – watches over her city. The war is over, but Alexandria has suffered in its wake. Caesar has returned to Rome, and the queen must restore her city and her kingdom to their former greatness. But now a body has been found floating upright at the bottom of the sea, anchored by a weight around its feet. It's the second corpse to be found this way, and with a city to rebuild and a kingdom to keep in line, Cleopatra cannot allow any more murders to interfere.

When winter's done, but spring has not yet fully sprung, much of Alaska turns to slush. Locally, it's called "breakup," and it's a…messy time of year. It's certainly messy for Kate Shugak; between doing her taxes, being chased by grizzlies, and getting shot at by feuding families, she has to cope with an NTSB investigation that hits very close to home. Then, of course, there's the body in the woods. And up at the old mining town. And…being Kate Shugak, somehow she can't leave well enough alone, and begins to tease apart a well-planned and surprising crime.

A mushroom hunting foray turns gruesome when Kate Shugak stumbles across a burnt, decaying corpse amid a grove of morels. Was the deceased the hapless victim of last year's forest fire? Why has no one reported him missing? And why wasn't he wearing any clothes? Absent evidence of foul play, the troopers are inclined to call it death by misadventure; Kate's instincts suggest otherwise, leading her down a path that requires her to confront issues of community, faith, and free will.

Three relatively quiet months have passed since Trooper Liam Campbell was assigned to the remote post of Newenham. It all changes when a local fishing boat is discovered scuttled and adrift - its crew of seven dead in circumstances that can't be accidental - and Wy stumbles into a murder scene at an archaeological dig. Cultures collide as the community must deal with too many outside distractions.

Once, Kate Shugak was the star investigator of the Anchorage D.A.'s office. Now she's gone back to her Aleut roots in the far Alaska north - where her talent for detection makes her the toughest crime-tracker in that stark and mysterious land.

Cleopatra, seventh of her name, all-powerful ruler of Egypt, has found her most able and trusted agent in Tetisheri, her Eye of Isis. So when Tetisheri asks permission to visit the Kingdom of Cyrenaica, she is surprised—and suspicious—when her queen grants her leave from Alexandria. A middleman in Cyrenaica has ceased communication and Tetisheri's uncle, a master trader, is on a mission to find out why. But there are others in Cyrenaica with hidden agendas: Julius Caesar's spies, Caesar's sworn enemy Mettelus Scipio, and the ever duplicitous King Juba I.

It's a crisp, snowless October in The Park. The root cellar is full, the cordwood is stacked, the oil drums are filled and there’s a freshly-butchered moose in her cache, but Kate Shugak must leave her cabin and head into the chaos of Anchorage, where the Alaska Federation of Natives’ annual convention is being held. Why? Because board members of the Niniltna Native Association have been dying...board members who just happened to oppose a lucrative new development project.

A party of hunters stumbles upon a desiccated human hand, a feisty grandmother meets an untimely death in her own kitchen, and the broken remains of a World War II-era transport plane emerge from the face of a calving glacier. It's all in a day's work for Sergeant Liam Campbell of the Alaska State Troopers. And 60 years ago is like yesterday.

Everyone knew Len Dreyer, a handyman for hire in the Park near Niniltna, Alaska, but no one knew anything else about him. Even Kate Shugak hired him to thin the trees on her 160-acre homestead and was planning to ask him to help build a small second cabin on her property for Johnny Morgan, a teenaged boy in her care. But she, the Park's unofficial p.i., seems to have known less about him than anyone.

In Alaska, people disappear every day. In Aleut detective Kate Shugak's Park, they've been disappearing a lot lately. Hikers head into the wilderness unprepared and get lost. Miners quit without notice at the busy Suulutaq Mine. Suicides leave farewell notes and vanish. Not only are Park rats disappearing at an alarming rate, but so is life in the Park as Kate knows it.

In Washington, D.C., a CIA analyst traces the sale of black market plutonium. As the pieces fit together, he realizes that a terrorist attack is under way on a valuable, and vulnerable, American target. He also sees that the Sojourner Truth is sailing right into the attack, putting his estranged wife, the second in command on the Sojourner, at the heart of an international crisis.

Kate, a former investigator for the Anchorage D.A. and now a P.I. for hire, is missing after a winter spent in mourning. Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin, Kate's best friend, needs her to help him work a new case. He discovers her hiding out in Bering, a small fishing village on Alaska's western coast, living and working under an assumed name-- working hard, as eighteen-hour workdays seem to be her only justification for getting up in the morning.

Thirty-one years ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff was convicted of murdering her seventeen-year-old son William. The jury returned a quick verdict of guilty, believing the prosecutor's claims that she had set fire to her own home with both her sons inside; William died and the other, Oliver, narrowly escaped. Victoria was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and though she pled not guilty at the trial, she never again denied her guilt.

Change never comes easy, but it comes just the same, and it's on its way to the Park, to Niniltna, in southeast Alaska. This time it concerns the possibility of drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve near there, near Aleutian P.I. Kate Shugak's home territory. Battle lines are drawn across their community, but at least it gives Kate something to do. Still just months after her lover's violent death, though she doesn't know quite how, she is trying to get back into her daily life.

A string of drug-related accidents at an oil company's rig in the Arctic Circle forces Kate Shugak to go undercover to scope out a cocaine connection along the TransAlaskan Pipeline. She's out to ID a major deal and shut down his operation. Of course, the deal has other ideas....

The Land Beyond, the third and final book in the Silk and Song trilogy, opens in Venice in 1324, where Johanna and company must find a new patron, a new way to earn their living, and above all a new home - all of which is complicated by a cunning kidnapping, a daring rescue, a tragic death, and a brush with royalty that puts Johanna and Jaufre and all their friends in the most danger they've seen yet.

It's fishing season, and Kate Shugak is working with Old Sam aboard the fish tender Freya when Cal Meany floats up dead. His reputation as a womanizer, strike breaker, and abusive father ensures that there are several suspects, multiple motives, and quite possibly more than one murderer. While Kate investigates the killing, her aunties mend nets, operate an illegal fish camp, and impart cultural wisdom to Jack and his son Johnny. Ultimately, Kate finds herself in grave danger, as even her aunts join the list of suspects.

Alexandria, 47 BC. For three centuries, the House of Ptolemy has governed the Kingdom of Egypt. Cleopatra – seventh of her name – rules from Alexandria, that beacon of commerce and learning that stands between the burning sands of the desert and the dark waters of the Middle Sea. But her realm is beset by ethnic rivalries, aristocratic feuds and courtly intrigues. The world is watching the young Queen, waiting for a misstep. And now her most trusted servant – her Eye – has been murdered and a vast shipment of newly minted coin stolen.