Restless in the grave

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The author's two popular series heroes team up well, sort of in this new novel. The private plane of a widely unliked businessman crashes; evidence points to sabotage. Wyanet Chouinard, the wife of Alaska state trooper Liam Campbell, looks like a prime suspect. Campbell turns to his friend, fellow trooper Jim Chopin, for help, and Jim turns to his friend and lover, private investigator Kate Shugak, who agrees to go undercover to find out who wanted the businessman dead (hint: a lot of people). Kate and Liam, as faithful readers of their series know, are quite different people: Kate, the headstrong renegade; Liam, the straight shooter who follows the rules. The Shugak novels are plot driven; the Campbells more character oriented. But the last Campbell novel was a decade ago, so it's not as if the author is trying to shoehorn one current protagonist into another one's series. Shugak fans who've never read a Campbell novel will think he's simply a character introduced here for the first time. Readers of both series will appreciate the clever and organic way the author brings these two characters together. As usual, the novel features a smart story and plenty of Alaskan history and culture. Another strong entry in the Shugak series and a welcome return for Campbell.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Finn Grant's death in the crash of his small plane in an apparent act of sabotage raises the question: who would want the self-made billionaire dead? About half the population of southwest Alaska, as Kate Shugak discovers when she goes undercover as a barmaid in bestseller Stabenow's entertaining 19th novel featuring the brash, fearless PI (after 2011's Though Not Dead). Kate's shrewd and ceaseless prying reveals that the unsavory Grant was involved in blackmail, mail fraud, and embezzlement, all connected to Alaska's many small airlines. Kate has a casual approach to evidence gathering, and her skill at breaking and entering finds her eventually thrown into a chest freezer, tossed into a Dumpster, and locked inside a freight container while her stalwart and highly intelligent companion, Mutt, who's half-wolf, half-husky, provides assistance. Readers new to the series may be mystified by the many references to past episodes. Yet the book sparkles with energy and wit, and packs an unexpected punch. 100,000 first printing; author tour. Agent: Danny Baror. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

A suspicious small plane crash turns out to be tied into big crimes with a long history in Alaska. Series favorite Aleut Kate Shugak (Though Not Dead) goes undercover to find the crooks, with cop Liam Campbell involved as well. [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/11.] (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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One NOVEMBER Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan   They kept it simple. They could cut off his right hand, or he could use it to learn how to fire the weapon they gave him. They had even picked the target. He knew before they told him it would be American. By now he could repeat the Imam's Friday harangue to do jihad on the invaders word for word. All he had wanted was to go home. Pakistan was a hungry place for a young Afghani man with no family or friends. His father had been killed when the Americans invaded in 2003, and his mother had taken the children and fled over the border, joining the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the camps. When she died, he found his way back to his own country, where he had not been so much recruited by the Taliban as kidnapped. At least they fed him. The camp three hundred yards up the narrow valley was small, an outpost dug into a small saddle between two hills, consisting of forty American soldiers. The top of the hill in front had been leveled to provide a landing place for a helicopter. He had been waiting for it for three days, broiling by day and freezing by night beneath the camouflage netting that had been stolen, they told him, from the enemy in another firefight in another valley. The weapon was beautiful and deadly, brand new, light of weight, black in color, made of heavy plastic married to a dense, dark metal with a dull shine. A zippered sheath kept it free of the dirt and sand that filtered through the netting to layer his clothing and coat the inside of his nostrils so that he could barely breathe. In the distance, a few tumbledown buildings marked a primitive landholding. A boy herded goats toward a patch of earth that showed the barest hint of green and hosted a few wormword bushes twisted into nightmare shapes from lack of water. Those fields he could see lay fallow, the only cash crop this area had ever known rooted up by the invaders. A faint sound of wings disturbed the air. He looked up. A steppe eagle had been hunting this valley every morning and evening, soaring overhead on brown wings spread six feet from wingtip to wingtip, black tail spread wide. This sound wasn't the eagle, though. It was the helicopter, coming at last. It hurtled up the valley, barely time enough for him to get the rifle out of its protective sheath. He settled his eye to the scope, as he had been taught, and sighted in. The magnification of the scope threw the aircraft into startlingly immediate relief. The windshield was scratched and sandy and the sun rendered the Plexiglas nearly opaque, so that the figures at the controls on the other side were barely visible to him. He caught the merest glimpse of a smooth cheek, nearly hidden beneath helmet and sunglasses. Too young yet to shave. His age. One shot was all it would take, they had told him, so long as he hit the target. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes as his finger pulled the trigger, slowly, firmly, even gently, again as they had taught him. The stock recoiled against his shoulder as the high explosive round left the barrel. The sound of the shot rendered him temporarily deaf. Before he could raise his eye from the scope, the helicopter touched down on the pad and on landing seemed simply to shatter into a thousand pieces. The three-man crew died instantly, shredded by fragments from their own splintering aircraft, as did the one soldier on the ground standing fifteen feet from the landing pad, skewered by a flying piece of one of the rotors. All six of the soldiers waiting for their ride home fifty feet from the landing pad were injured as well, two of them mortally. The watcher upslope granted him just enough time to be amazed at the destruction he had wrought before putting a bullet into the back of his head precisely where his skull ended and his spinal column began.   Copyright (c) 2012 by Dana Stabenow Excerpted from Restless in the Grave by Dana Stabenow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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