Showing results by author "Dana Stabenow" in All Categories

Eighteen months ago, Aleut Kate Shugak quit her job investigating sex crimes for the Anchorage DA’s office and retreated to her father’s homestead in a national park in the interior of Alaska. But the world has a way of beating a path to her door, however remote. In the middle of one of the bitterest Decembers in recent memory ex-boss — and ex-lover — Jack Morgan shows up with an FBI agent in tow.

Inside Alaska's biggest national park, surrounding the town of Niniltna, a gold mining company has started buying up land. The residents of the Park, are uneasy. "But gold is up to nine hundred dollars an ounce," is the refrain of Talia Macleod, the popular Alaskan skiing champ the company hired to improve their relations with Alaskans. And she promises much needed jobs to the locals. But before she can make her way to every village in the area to make her case at town meetings and village breakfasts, there are two murders—one a long-standing mine opponent, and Ms. Macleod herself.

In Everything Under the Heavens, 16-year-old Johanna fled Cambaluc - and her murderous stepmother - joining her uncle's westbound caravan on the Silk Road. With her foster brother Jaufre and a few faithful companions, they made it to the rooftop of the world - Terak Pass - separating Mongol China from the scattered sheikdoms of the Persian Empire. Then, disaster struck. In a climactic skirmish, Johanna and her stallion, North Wind, were abducted and Jaufre left for dead.

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.

A mid-air collision in the Alaskan wilderness between two small aircraft leaves ten people dead. Was it a bird strike, pilot error...or premeditated murder? Then an eleventh body is found in the wreckage: a man shot gangland style, twice in the chest and once in the head. In an investigation that reaches to the highest levels of government, justice may not be served, but Kate Shugak is determined that the truth will out, even at the risk of her life and the lives of those she loves most.

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.

Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell, newly promoted to corporal, is slowly making a home for himself in the remote town of Newenham. Between DUIs and domestic disputes, life is relatively tranquil, until Campbell's girlfriend, bush pilot Wyanet Chouinard, delivers a shipment of mail to a remote post office, where she finds the postmistress murdered. The hunt is on for a killer who seems to have vanished into the Bush... Until another victim is found. Chilling connections from the past make the search a matter of life and death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's Labor Day in Blewestown, Alaska, and it seems most of the town's 3,500 residents have turned out to celebrate - or to cause trouble. Not Liam Campbell, though. He's checking out the local watering hole in his new town. He's finally made it out of Newenham and is ready for a quiet life with his wife. He's been in town for about a week when an archaeologist invites him out to his dig site outside of town. He's on the verge of a momentous discovery, one he says will be worth the state trooper's time.

In Alaska, 100 years of bad blood between the villages of Kushtaka and Kuskulana come to a boil when the body of a young Kushtaka ne'er-do-well is found wedged in a fish wheel. Sergeant Jim Chopin's prime suspect is a Kuskulana man who is already in trouble in both villages for falling in love across the river. But when the suspect disappears, members of both tribes refuse to speak to Jim. When a second murder that looks suspiciously like payback occurs, Jim has no choice but to call in Kate Shugak for help.

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.

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.

Kate Shugak hires onto the staff of a political campaign to work security for a Native woman running for state senator. The candidate has been receiving anonymous threats, and Kate, who went to college with two of the staffers, is to become her shadow, watching the crowds at rallies and fund-raisers. But just as she's getting started, the campaign is rocked by the murder of their staff researcher.

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.

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.

Alaska aviation entrepreneur Finn Grant died in the fiery crash of his Piper Super Cub. Someone sabotaged his engine, and virtually everyone in southwestern Alaska has a motive, including his betrayed wife, his bullied children, and Liam’s wife, bush pilot Wyanet Chouinard. With few places to turn, Liam asks his former mentor Niniltna post commander Sergeant Jim Chopin, for help, and Jim quickly brings Kate onto the case. Working undercover as - of all things - a waitress at Bill’s Bar and Grill, Kate learns over beer and burgers that Grant’s business had expanded meteorically over the last two years.