Killing Grounds (A Kate Shugak Investigation) - Softcover

Dana Stabenow

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190880064X ISBN 13: 9781908800640

Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2013

Synopsis

Stabbed, beaten, strangled, drowned. Sometimes people get exactly what they deserve.

Cal Meany is a cheat, a poacher, an abusive father and an adulterous husband. So nobody is that surprised when Kate Shugak finds his body floating in the bay. What is surprising is that the corpse has been beaten, stabbed, strangled and drowned.

Meany's happily bereaved wife and children are prime suspects. Then again, so are most of his neighbours. But when Meany's daughte is murdered, and her lover disappears, Kate begins to think that this unusual crime may not be so readily solved.

About this title

Review

Like Nevada Barr, Dana Stabenow writes mysteries so firmly rooted in the natural world that their sense of place becomes a vital part of the plot. In this book about Native Alaskan crime solver Kate Shugak, the ocean and the men who fish it for salmon are described in such vivid detail that you'll never look at a salmon steak the same way again. When a particularly nasty fisherman is murdered, there's no end of suspects--including members of Kate's own family. The story also sports a richly ironic undertone of political incorrectness, as Kate muses about the forest rangers, "who wanted to annex every square foot of land they saw and keep it pristine and inviolate, unsullied by human hand. They failed to recall that the indigenous peoples who came across the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age had their hands all over anything that had the remotest possibility of nutritional value, and were every bit as much of the landscape and the wheel of life as the fish and the birds and the mammals." Previous Shugak sorties in paperback include Breakup, Blood Will Tell, Play with Fire, and A Cold-Blooded Business.

About the Author

In 1991 Dana Stabenow, born in Alaska and raised on a 75-foot fishing trawler, was offered a three-book deal for the first of her Kate Shugak mysteries. In 1992, the first in the series, A Cold Day for Murder, received an Edgar Award.

Edition details

• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 190880064X
• ISBN 13: 9781908800640
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 274