Bear witness

Five days a week, wildlife specialist Stacie Calder, the winning narrator of this appealing series launch from Jensen (the Pet Rescue mysteries), cruises the Alaska coast aboard the ClemElk, a tour boat, with her two-year-old husky, Sasha. One day, Stacie has just alerted the tourists to a pod of harbor seals and pups along the shore when a pushy passenger starts loudly grilling her about the boat's safety. Soon after the ClemElk's captain identifies the rude man as Sheldon Truitt, a former employee planning to start a rival coastal tour business, Truitt goes missing. Might Truitt have fallen overboard--or was he pushed? Truitt's body is later spotted on the shore, and though the most obvious suspect in what becomes a murder investigation is the captain, dozens of others aboard the ship may have had a motive for ensuring the conniving Truitt never returned to port. As romantic sparks fly between Stacie and Liam Amaruq, the state trooper assigned to the case, a killer more dangerous than any wild predator prowls the ClemElk. Jensen nicely balances the crime solving and Stacie's personal life, and dog lovers will cheer Sasha's heroics. Cozy fans will eagerly await the sequel. Agent: Paige Wheeler, Creative Media Agency. (May)

Prolific dog mystery/adventure/romance author Linda O. Johnston takes on a new pseudonym to launch her Alaska Untamed Mystery series. As she's eager to tell everyone, Stacie Calder isn't just a tour guide; she's a trained naturalist who has a lot more experience and wisdom than Lettie Amblex, her 10-years-younger assistant aboard the ClemElk. So it's no surprise when sharp-eyed Stacie sees Sheldon Truit, a former ClemElk deckhand returning as a tourist, trying to chat up Capt. Palmer Clementos or when Truit, rebuffed by the captain, turns to Stacie asking if she might consider joining him in a rival tour company he's thinking of launching. The launch doesn't get very far, though, because Truit promptly disappears from the ship (Stacie's naturally the first one to notice that he's missing) and is soon found half submerged on a beach on the fjord Tracy Arm. Whodunit? There are lots of potential suspects, but most of them don't register because Stacie is so intent on her amatory pursuit of Alaska State Trooper Liam Amaruq that she has little attention to spare for either the tourists who are paying her salary or the natural wonders that presumably attracted those tourists in the first place. Instead, she methodically considers one suspect after another but shoots each one down in her mind with a rapid volley of questions. No fear: One of them--it really doesn't matter which one--will turn out to be guilty, and Stacie's fears that if the case were solved, "I doubted I'd ever see this trooper again" seem premature. A little bit of everything but not very much of anything. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.