BOOK REVIEW: ‘Though Not Dead’

THOUGH NOT DEAD
By Dana Stabenow
Minotaur, $25.99 464 pages

FROZEN ASSETS
By Quentin Bates
Soho, $25 288 pages

’’Though Not Dead” begins with the terror of the Black Death when it hit Alaska in 1918 and then explodes through the decades in that unique wilderness with its gold nuggets, its wildcatters and the dedicated mavericks who are true Alaskans.

Of whom Dana Stabenow is unquestionably one. Her knowledge and her passion flame when she writes these rollicking, slam-bang thrillers about her state.

Her latest book is full of historical mystery, stolen icons, burglaries, beatings and general mayhem. Her investigator, Kate Shugak, has to be the most battered woman in Alaskan crime fiction. She can hardly take a nap or walk out the door of her cabin without being whacked on the head. Keep in mind that Kate travels with a formidable protector in the shape of Mutt, a female, 140-pound half-wolf.

Kate is Mutt’s property to be protected, especially when she is in peril, as Kate is for most of the book. Ms. Stabenow’s descriptions of how Mutt rescues Kate, mostly by straddling her prone body and licking her bruised face while threatening to savage any other rescuers, are worth reading simply for the portrayal of a pair that protect each other. Kate already has spent a frantic night worrying about Mutt after the wolf is shot saving her owner, and Mutt doesn’t worry about anything except keeping her owner alive and well. It is Mutt who is fearless about using nose and paws and even a nip with her teeth to urge Kate into action, however incautious it may be.

As a reward, Mutt gets to kill or at least maim anyone she considers a threat.

The plot bursts with color and characters as Kate sets out on the trail of the legacy she has received from her uncle, known as Old Sam, and dubbed the father of all the “park rats” who reside in National Park. According to the author’s estimate, there is one person in Alaska for every 1,600 acres, and that’s about how they want it to stay.

The book is punctuated with vivid flashbacks from Old Sam’s life. Although he has left all he owned to Kate, he has urged her to solve some ancient family secrets and “find my father.”

Nothing gets in Kate’s way as she takes to the snows in her Arctic Cat, and you get used to her accounts of places with names like Squaw Candy Creek, and Niniltna, following the Kanuyaq River from Ahtna to Chulyin, overland to the Suulutaq Mine where one of the world’s largest deposits of gold had been found, heading for the remoteness of Hot Canyon Springs. She slowly gets closer to the heart of the mystery contained in an old compass with a secret drawer. Ms. Stabenow milks her material for every moment of excitement, and her setting is awash with melodrama.

There is even “the eminence grise of the Alaska robber barons” - Erland Bannister, whose previous ambitions to kidnap Kate landed him in Alaska’s only maximum-security prison for a life sentence, although nobody seems to think that is likely.

If you have in mind a long trip anywhere, including Alaska, this is the book to put in your backpack. Even if Ms. Stabenow might be occasionally guilty of exaggeration, nobody will care as long as she goes on writing thrillers about the place she loves.

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In “Frozen Assets,” in addition to a dead body floating in the harbor of an Icelandic fishing village and rumbles of governmental corruption and financial crisis, there is a blogger.

That may be about all Officer Gunnhildur needs to complicate her once relatively quiet life as an Icelandic law enforcement officer. The complication in her days is Skandalblogger who, as you might expect, writes things like “Our latest gem of gossip … has resulted in the abject fury of a certain recently re-elected former jailbird who has been going [crazy] over our revelation that he’s had a hair transplant. … [I]t’s the rug thing that’s really got his goat.”

While the frozen corpse in the village is in the true spirit of Nordic crime, Quentin Bates takes it several important steps further when he uses Officer Gunna to spearhead an investigation that ties into the national business and banking world of Reykjavik. The anonymous blogger contributes what may wind up as clues as the killer strikes again.

Mr. Bates does a crisp job of characterization with Officer Gunna and a selection of local bureaucrats, and it would seem that what we have here is the beginning of a new and frosted investigative series about Icelandic crime.

Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.