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Bad Blood by Dana Stabenow (view source)
Revision as of 13:28, 14 February 2013
, 13:28, 14 February 2013no edit summary
You would think that if there were two villages side by side then they would be much of a muchness with lots of toing and froing between them and with regular intermarriages. It wasn't so with Kushtaka and Kuskulana in the Alaskan National Park. One village - well, a small township really - thrived, whilst the other, Kushtaka, went downhill. A hundred years of bad blood occasionally erupted into violence and there was little doubt that the responsibility for suspicious death of a teenager was down to the people of Kuskulana and that there would be vengeance. It was down to State Trooper Jim Chopin to find the culprit and prevent the inter-village warfare from escalating out of control.
I came late - well twenty years late - to Dana's Stabenow's [[A Cold Day for Murder (A Kate Shugak Investigation) by Dana Stabenow|Kate Shugak]] series. There's nothing I like better than a detective series which you can pick up and run with and this one had the bonus of originality. Kate Shugak is a native Aleut working as a private investigator. She's just over five feet tall, has previously had her throat cut from ear to ear and has a half-wolf/half Husky companion by the name of Mutt. I'd read the first three books in the twenty book series and I would normally have avoided the temptation to read the twentieth book in the series, but - the press release said that it was an ideal entry for new readers. So, did it work?
In her acknowledgements Stabenow says that she had problems with ''telling'' rather than ''showing'' before the book was edited and I don't think they were entirely cleared up. I've always been impressed by her ability to cut straight to the heart of the story but this time I'll confess to finding the opening just a little ''tedious'' with rather too much in the way of long- and short-term history. As a new reader this might well stand you in good stead, but I think you'd also find keeping up with the who's who and from where just a little difficult - and made even more confusing by the names of the two villages being so similar. If you've read part of the series I'd advise keeping the books in order - I kept suffering 'oh, no, So and So is ''dead''' moments.