Great covers and some promising mysteries set in an area of
the world that I have never visited before in my reading. To date there have
been four Nathan Active series books published, and yes I did buy the other two
also. That probably sums up my reading/library/TBR issues. How can you commit
to buying four books from an author that you haven’t read one thing by? What if
I don’t particularly enjoy the first? No way is Stan Jones an isolated instance
either, for him you could probably substitute fifty other names. I’m like a
greedy child let loose in a sweet shop...what was the child’s name in Willy
Wonka?
Anyway hopefully the first in the series rocks and even if
it doesn't, I ought to read the following ones as penance for my own rashness.
This will cover my Alaska state entry when I start my USA state reading challenge next year.
Thanks to Keishon at Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog. Her reviews are here:
White Sky, Black Ice
An Alaskan State trooper must satisfy both Eskimo and
"white man's" justice.
Trooper Nathan Active, child of a fifteen-year-old unmarried
Inupiat Eskimo girl, was given up for adoption and raised in Anchorage, where
he graduated from the university. Now that he has been posted to his remote
birth village, Chukchi, he longs to return to civilization. Before that
happens, he is confronted with atypical suicides. Eskimos are notoriously at
risk for self-slaughter, but never has one man after another shot himself in
the Adam's apple. Can a shaman's curse really be at work?
Lucy Generous is a beautiful villager who is enlivening
Nathan's tour of duty. Nathan's mother tells him to beware; she wants him to
find a girl who went to college and has a good job. But with Lucy's help, the
nalauqmiiyaak (almost white) state trooper begins to understand his Eskimo
heritage, which provides him with the solution to the crimes that he is
confronted with.
This is the first in a series of Nathan Active mysteries.
Shaman Pass
Nathan Active is regarded as 'half white' by Alaskans. He is
a state trooper, adopted and raised in Anchorage, but now serving a tour of
duty in Chukchi, the village of his birth, where he is called upon to
investigate the murder of an Inupiat tribal leader. The victim was killed with
an antique ivory and wood harpoon returned to the community by the Smithsonian,
in accordance with the terms of the Indian Graves Act, just a few days earlier
together with an unidentified Inupiat mummy nicknamed 'Uncle Frosty.'
With the help of his girlfriend, birth mother, aged
grandfather, and other old-timers, Nathan must grapple with the identity of the
murderer and the elusive motive.