Despite the gloomy title, Kate is having fun in "Restless In The Grave", even if she is constantly being beaten up and locked into confined spaces. Having freed herself from her duties as Chair of the board of the Niniltna Native Association, Kate grabs the chance to head out of town to carry out an undercover investigation of a possible murder at Newenham, Trooper Liam Campbell's domain.

 

For those of us who have read the Liam Campbell books, "Fire And Ice",  "So Sure Of Death", "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and "Better To Rest", much fun is had from seeing Liam's world through Kate's eyes. I was a bit surprised to find how much Kate enjoyed the sight of Liam in uniform. I figured that she and Wy Chouinard would work something out and I expected (and got) fireworks when Kate and Moses met.

 

Kate's investigation uncovers something much larger and more sinister than she had expected and gets her involved with all kinds of Federal agencies. The plot twists are nicely timed, the story is both plausible and cautionary with respect to security in Alaska.

 

Meanwhile, back in Niniltna, Jim Chopin finally acknowledges to himself that Kate's house is now his home and that it is empty without her. He also discovers that Kate's nemesis has been release from jail and has become a shareholder in the gold mine.

 

Although Kate has a good time in this book, there is a sense that her freedom,  and perhaps her happiness, will be short-lived. It seems that "Restless In The Grave" refers to the spirit of Old Sam and that his legacy to Kate has still fully to unfold.

 

In bringing Kate's and Liam's worlds together Dana Stabenow  again demonstrates her ability to bring characters to life with relatively few words and to maintain an ensemble cast without letting them slip into plot devices. This crossover also made me aware of what a good job Marguerite Gavin, the narrator of the Liam Campbell series and the Kate Shugak series, does in creating and maintaining distinctive voices for this wide range of characters.

I liked Liam Campbell a little better in this book than in the first. I think there is hope for his redemption after all. It was refreshing to see that the pain Liam and Wy caused through their affair is not glossed over and continues to have an impact on not just their behaviour but their sense of who they are.

 

Meeting Liam's father helped round him out and the addition of another trooper to the post gave a more realistic context for assessing him.

 

Dana Stabenow delivers two murder mysteries to move the plot along this time - a whole family killed on a fishing boat and a researcher killed at an archaeological dig. Both are well thought through, with multiple who-dunnit candidates and good local colour but for me Stabenow's strength lies in her willingness and ability to make me feel the emotional weight of the extinction of a whole family.

 

On the whole this remains a light, enjoyable read, with lots of jumping out of planes and on to boats and ruining of uniforms at a brisk pace. There are moments of introspection that make the action matter more and there is a continuous and skilful development of my knowledge of the local cast of characters that promises to build the books into a rich world rather than just a series of solved murders.

 

I'm looking forward to reading the next one.

I downloaded “Fire and Ice” the first book in Dana Stabenow’s Liam Campbell series, to help bridge the gap while I wait for the Brilliance Audio version of “Killing Grounds”, book 8 in the Kate Shugak series, to come out in January 2014 to get another slice of Alaskan life.

 

What I got was something quite different from the Kate Shugak series, even down to the writing style but something that gave me another view on what Alaska can mean to people.

 

Liam Campbell is a newly-demoted State Trooper, who steps off the plane at the remote town he has been exiled to, and steps into a storm of violence, eccentricity, lust and death.

 

The story is well-plotted, seasoned with humor and chaos, stuffed with larger-than-life characters that we know will be in all the future books and it gives a vivid view of what it feels like to take on the potentially lethal task of “herring spotting” from a light plane in an overcrowded sky.

 

Stabenow’s books are never just about finding out who killed whom. They are an exploration of why people live the way they do and what it is about Alaska that drives particular behaviors.

 

In this book Alaska is being shown as a place where people go to make a new start. It’s also shown as place with all the usual problems of violence against women, alcohol addiction, child abuse and the pressures of a small town to make you behave “appropriately”.

 

I couldn’t quite bring myself to like Liam Campbell, the man with a tragic past and a grief-filled present. Then I realized that this was what Stabenow intended. I couldn’t like Liam because he doesn’t like himself. His distaste for himself at first appears to be a reaction to things he couldn’t control but feels accountable for: death’s on his watch, a tragedy in his family; things that would damage any man. As the book progresses we realize that the fundamental source of internal disgust is that he is a man who has betrayed himself and everyone he loves and he can’t forgive himself for that. The problem was, I couldn’t forgive him for it either.

 

There are some signs that Liam is on a journey of redemption. In future books, I hope to see something about him that will make me care. I’d like to see his self-pity and self-absorption replaced by some passion for making a difference by actually doing his job. Perhaps the reason Stabenow keeps Campbell out of his uniform for most of the book, is to signal his failure to engage and to become who he should be.

 

The sex scene at the beginning of the book caught me by surprise. It is graphic without being gratuitous but it goes way beyond anything you’d find in a Kate Shugak novel. The scene is actually well written – it describes arousal without being arousing. It is necessary because the sexual attraction between Campbell and the Wy is central to how Liam came to be where he is. I like the fact that Stabenow sets this up so that we understand that lust does not explain or excuse Liam’s actions any more than alcohol explains why someone is a drunk.

 

I enjoy Marguerite Gavin as the narrator of the Kate Shugak series. I wish someone else had been chosen to read the Liam Campbell series. I think a male reader would have been more appropriate and would have made a clearer separation between Liam and Kate. She didn’t distract me from the book, but she didn’t add to it either.

This was an interesting story about Alaskan bush pilots and an Alaskan state trooper set in an isolated part of the Alaskan coastline in Bristol Bay. There were a few things that set off my grrrrr meter, but all in all it was a good read.

This is a newer series from Dana Stabenow. Her Kate Shugak series has been very successful. This one is about Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell. Liam's life is a mess after he ends a love affair and decides to make a better go at life with his wife, Jenny, and their little son only to have them taken from him in a drunk-driving accident. His son is killed instantly and Jenny is left in a vegetative state, sustained by life support.

Liam has pretty much checked out of life when more tragedy srikes. A family of five dies of exposure on his watch. He didn't make the decisions not to respond when calls from the victims' family to search for them went unanswered but the troopers who did were under his command and he was not paying much attention. Liam finds himself busted down from sargent back to trooper rank and reassigned from Anchorage to a backwoods post in Newenham that nobody wants to work.

He literally steps off the plane at the new post and walks straight into a murder investigation. There in front of him lies a man, or at least the torso of a man. The man's head is gone, taken off by the propeller of plane he appeared to be priming for flight. And much to Liam's surprise, the pilot of this plane is none other than the love of his life, the one he gave up to go back to Jenny, Wyanet Chouinard. Talk about a great set up!

This was fun, a decent mystery and a cool setting. Liam and Wy had me cringing a bit with the first love scene but the action and pacing of the rest of the story were good and though I guessed much of the "who-dunnit" some of the other bits still surprised me. On to the next in this series!