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A review by ncrabb
A Fatal Thaw by Dana Stabenow
3.0
Spring cleaning is one of those universal rituals. Even 31-year-old Kate Shugak, an Aleut private investigator in far-flung Alaska, must engage in it.
Not far from Kate, a quiet buttoned-down computer programmer named Roger McAniff is doing a bit of spring cleaning, too. His version of spring cleaning involves murdering nine people—10 if you count the developing fetus in the womb of one of the dead women. He just went nonlinear that day and began indiscriminately killing people whom he encountered. It is Kate Shugak who, warned that he draws inexorably closer to her, puts an end to the killings. No, she doesn’t shoot McAniff. Her Huskey/Wolf mix, Mutt, gets her mouth around McAniff’s throat and holds him still until the police arrest him. But there’s just one hot problem in a cold land: Lisa Getty is dead, but tests confirm that someone shot her with a different rifle. McAniff insisted he only used one gun. So, who killed Lisa Getty? And why did she have to die?
There’s no dearth of suspects. Lisa was off-the-charts beautiful and through-the-roof promiscuous. She had no concern about the man’s age or marital status. She seduced any man that moved, and the women and girls in the small Alaskan town are universally glad she’s dead. But Kate, who is under pressure from state police to investigate the death, is sure none of them did it. Lisa also poached animals and harvested their organs for sale in the Asian sexual-enhancement trade. No botanist was Lisa, but she conclusively proved that you could grow commercial-grade marijuana in the far and frozen north. Naturally, her clients added to the length of the suspect list.
The characters in this series are memorable, and the peak you get into the culture is interesting for the most part.
Not far from Kate, a quiet buttoned-down computer programmer named Roger McAniff is doing a bit of spring cleaning, too. His version of spring cleaning involves murdering nine people—10 if you count the developing fetus in the womb of one of the dead women. He just went nonlinear that day and began indiscriminately killing people whom he encountered. It is Kate Shugak who, warned that he draws inexorably closer to her, puts an end to the killings. No, she doesn’t shoot McAniff. Her Huskey/Wolf mix, Mutt, gets her mouth around McAniff’s throat and holds him still until the police arrest him. But there’s just one hot problem in a cold land: Lisa Getty is dead, but tests confirm that someone shot her with a different rifle. McAniff insisted he only used one gun. So, who killed Lisa Getty? And why did she have to die?
There’s no dearth of suspects. Lisa was off-the-charts beautiful and through-the-roof promiscuous. She had no concern about the man’s age or marital status. She seduced any man that moved, and the women and girls in the small Alaskan town are universally glad she’s dead. But Kate, who is under pressure from state police to investigate the death, is sure none of them did it. Lisa also poached animals and harvested their organs for sale in the Asian sexual-enhancement trade. No botanist was Lisa, but she conclusively proved that you could grow commercial-grade marijuana in the far and frozen north. Naturally, her clients added to the length of the suspect list.
The characters in this series are memorable, and the peak you get into the culture is interesting for the most part.