The gripping new Kate Shugak novel by New York Times bestselling author Dana Stabenow. What seems a tragic accident soon becomes a murder investigation as Kate is drawn into a case of political intrigue.
A mid-air collision in the Alaskan wilderness between two small aircraft leaves ten people dead. Was it a bird strike, pilot error... or premeditated murder?
Then an eleventh body is found in the wreckage: a man shot gangland style, twice in the chest and once in the head.
In an investigation that reaches to the highest levels of government, justice may not be served, but Kate Shugak is determined that the truth will out, even at the risk of her life and the lives of those she loves most.
Excerpt
Bobby Clark always wore shorts to Ahtna, January or June. It put both his prostheses on full display, which put him solidly in the category of retired military, which he was. White guys, and it was mostly whites who lived in Ahtna, the Alaska Natives having settled down the road in Ahtna Junction after the ANCSA lands distribution, would eyeball his bionic limbs, one over the knee and one under, and nod in solidarity. Some would raise a hook in salute. Some would give their own leg a significant tap. The guys with the canes and the walkers and the ones still in a chair would look envious but not to the point of going for their gun.
Over the years, he had also made it a habit to make the cop shop his first stop. He was on a first-name basis with the police chief, Kenny Hazen, and had at minimum a nodding acquaintance with the officers who worked for him. Bobby was all for keeping the peace, especially when almost anywhere else in this country the color of his skin would be enough to get him shot for rolling down his window after a pull-over.
He had a wife and a daughter now, and he was going to dance with his daughter at the father–daughter dance at her high school in ten or twelve years. His first goal for any shopping trip was to come home alive.
In pursuance of that goal, he’d put the manager of the Ahtna Costco on speed dial on his cell phone. The guy had a standing invitation to drop by for a drink whenever he was in Niniltna. He’d made a point of befriending the new Fish & Game trooper stationed in Ahtna and extended the same offer, although that wasn’t a stretch because Bobby had known Eddie Totemoff since he had been the star forward of the Cordova Wolverines and the Wolverines flew north for their annual grudge match with the Kanuyaq Kings.
Bobby never went empty-handed into Ahtna, either. Sometimes it was a couple of fillets of Boris Balluta’s justly famous smoke fish to spread around. Other times it was a few jars of Ruthe Bauman’s equally famous rhubarb chutney. Last August he’d brought in one of Dinah’s raspberry slab cakes, which had been well received, but this year she was head down, ass up in a documentary the Niniltna Native Association had hired her to do on Ekaterina Shugak, which had expanded to include the four aunties. He was pretty sure she hadn’t even heard him when he’d told her yesterday that he was making an Ahtna run.
After hunting and before snow it might be five pounds of freshly ground mooseburger or a package of caribou steaks. Ahtna’s mayor changed with the political winds but the city manager, a thin, tough, bleached blonde named Dolores Easter was an enduring fixture and owned a fondness for George Dickel Single Barrel 9 Year Old, with which Bobby took care to keep her well supplied.
It was fucking exhausting to be black in America.
It was fucking expensive, too. Boris didn’t give away his smoke fish.
He’d left the house at eight a.m., Dinah already at work in the studio he had built for her next to the A-frame, sixyear-old Katya building a Lego fire rescue helicopter on the floor next to her. He had been in stealth mode because at the first sound of the engine Katya would have burst out the door, demanding he take her along. He didn’t want anyone giving her the side eye. He was probably being overly cautious, giving the advance work he’d been doing for years in Ahtna, but then he was a black man from Tennessee and he’d imbibed caution with his mother’s milk. A lot of white Americans had come north following the oil rush of the seventies and eighties. Many of them had stuck around, and not for the betterment of the state, either.
Now he was on his way home again and happy to be, the back of his GMC Sierra piled as high as the cab with everything from batteries to toilet paper—learned that lesson during Covid—to a package of New York strips that had him, in his imagination, firing up the grill the second he got home, to some kind of stinky cheese Dinah liked, to tampons, which he could finally buy without turning red enough to show through his skin. Yeah, that’s right, he thought when the other men in line looked askance, I got a woman, you losers should be so lucky.
All of it was tarped and roped securely to the tiedowns that lined the pickup’s bed so he felt free to let the speedometer creep all the way up to forty. The gravel road had been graded and oiled the month before but it never took long for the axlekilling potholes to return. The Sierra bounced from one to the other, daylight between the surface and his tires more often than not, a billow of dust behind him large enough to look like his very own cumulous cloud. He slowed over the Last Chance bridge, sped up again, and slowed down again at the jog in the road before the Deem homestead.
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