clair081

The most recent novel in the Nathan Active series by Stan Jones, set in the town of Chukchi in the north of Alaska, offers a lot of native culture and Arctic life. Jones's books always use native language and the distinctive quality of life in a small town of blended native and outsider peoples (and Nathan himself, adopted out of the culture as a child and now returned as a cop, is thought of locally as half-native, but learning. He's now attached to Grace Palmer, the emotionally wounded woman from an earlier novel, as well as her adopted daughter. What Tundra Kill adds to the mix is aother artifact of Alaska's history and culture: a female governor with national ambitions and a folksy style: not Sarah Palin but a later (and current) governor cut from the same cloth. There is considerable Palin-esque satire in the earlier segments and in the governor's Palin-esque language throughout. But the plot actually turns on the death of a local man in a still-frigid incident: he...

I haven't read all of Jarkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide series, but the current one (Darling, translated ably by Katriina Kitchens) is focused less on  Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamӓki than on his team (in comparison to the ones I have read). The result is very good, right up to the end (which I found a bit rushed and a bit more brutal in a casual way than anything that had come before). I kept thinking of Ed McBain and the 87th Precinct books, in the way that Sipila handles the shifting point of view and the broadened focus on the characters. The cops are interesting and well differentiated from one another, and along the way another interesting character, defense attorney Nea Lind, also becomes an important aspect of the story. The plotting is also off-beat in an interesting way. When a mentally handicapped adult woman is found dead, the police focus in on a group of men (including the caretaker in her apartment building) who hang out together in the Alamo Bar; each in turn...