Kate Shugak Novels

Book 14: A Kate Shugak Novel

Thirty-one years ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff was convicted of murdering her seventeen-year-old son William. The jury returned a quick verdict of guilty, believing the prosecutor’s claims that she had set fire to her own home with both her sons inside; William died and the other, Oliver, narrowly escaped. Victoria was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and though she pled not guilty at the trial, she never again denied her guilt.

Now her daughter, Charlotte Muravieff, has hired Kate Shugak to clear her mother’s name. Her daughter has always believed in her innocence, and now that Victoria has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Charlotte wants her free. Kate is the only p.i. Charlotte can find who’s willing to take such a long-shot case. Kate, on the other hand, is only willing because she’s suddenly a single parent to a teenager, a teenager she hopes will decide to go to college. Besides, it can’t be bad to do a favor for the Bannister family, one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Alaska’s short history.

As Kate begins an investigation, Victoria protests, refusing to cooperate. But soon it seems she isn’t the only one who wants to leave the past in the past. In this spell-binding novel, A Taint in the Blood, Kate’s confrontation with thirty years of secrets and regret-and murder-in one of Alaska’s most powerful families shows award-winning crime writer Dana Stabenow at the top of her game.

Book 13: A Kate Shugak Novel

Everyone knew Len Dreyer, a handyman for hire in the Park near Niniltna, Alaska, but no one knew anything else about him. Even Kate Shugak hired him to thin the trees on her 160-acre homestead and was planning to ask him to help build a small second cabin on her property for Johnny Morgan, a teenaged boy in her care. But she, the Park’s unofficial p.i., seems to have known less about him than anyone.

Alaska is a place where anybody can bury his history and start fresh, and for any reason, but this particular mystery comes to light when Len Dreyer turns up murdered. His body is discovered, frozen solid, in the path of a receding glacier with the hole from a shotgun blast in his chest. No one even knew he was missing, but it turns out he’s been missing for months.

Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin asks Kate to help him dig into Dreyer’s background, in the hope of finding some reason for his murder. She takes the case, mindful of the need for gainful employment as she copes with her responsibility for Johnny, a constant reminder of his father, her dead lover. Little does she imagine that by trying to provide for him she just might put him right in the path of danger.

A talented writer at the prime of her abilities, Stabenow delivers a masterful crime novel in A Grave Denied that turns out to be as much about living as it is about dying.

Book 12: A Kate Shugak Novel

Dana Stabenow’s back with another winning installment in A Fine and Bitter Snow

Change never comes easy, but it comes just the same, and it’s on its way to the Park, to Niniltna, in southeast Alaska. This time it concerns the possibility of drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve near there, near Aleutian P.I. Kate Shugak’s home territory. Battle lines are drawn across their community, but at least it gives Kate something to do. Still just months after her lover’s violent death, though she doesn’t know quite how, she is trying to get back into her daily life.

First, tensions run high as their resident park ranger, Dan O’Brien, is deemed “too green for them” by management and asked to take early retirement. Kate rallies the troops inside the Park to fight for his job, but before she can really start throwing her weight around, a long-time Park resident is brutally murdered, another stabbed and left for dead as well.

Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin enlists Kate to help investigate, and together they tackle the loose ends: motive, timing, opportunity, means. One thing is for certain-in Dana Stabenow’s masterful crime novels about the beauty and the danger of living and dying in Alaska, nothing is as simple as it seems.

“Dana Stabenow excels at evoking the bleakness and beauty of the far north.”
-Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

Kate Shugak hires onto the staff of a political campaign to work security for a Native woman running for state senator. The candidate has been receiving anonymous threats, and Kate, who went to college with two of the staffers, is to become her shadow, watching the crowds at rallies and fund-raisers. But just as she’s getting started, the campaign is rocked by the murder of their staff researcher. In order to track the killer, Kate will have to retrace the researcher’s steps and delve into the past, in particular the grisly murder of a “good-time girl” during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1915. Little can she guess the impact a ninety-year-old unsolved case could have on a modern-day psychotic killer. . .

Book 10: A Kate Shugak Novel

Edgar Award winner Dana Stabenow has written numerous atmospheric crime novels featuring the very prickly, very human Kate Shugak, but her novels also have a scene-stealing costar: Alaska, unforgiving, breathtaking, dangerous, and beautiful. Stabenow’s evocation of this wilderness, combined with her talent for bringing characters to life and creating knuckle-whitening suspense, has made her “one of the strongest voices in crime fiction.” (Seattle Times).

Now in Midnight Come Again, all these elements come together for Stabenow’s most compelling Kate Shugak novel to date.

Kate, a former investigator for the Anchorage D.A. and now a P.I. for hire, is missing after a winter spent in mourning. Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin, Kate’s best friend, needs her to help him work a new case. He discovers her hiding out in Bering, a small fishing village on Alaska’s western coast, living and working under an assumed name– working hard, as eighteen-hour workdays seem to be her only justification for getting up in the morning. But before they can even discuss Kate’s last several months, or what Jim is doing looking for her in Bering, they’re up to their eyes in Jim’s case, which is suddenly more complicated– and more dangerous– than they suspected.

A magnificent crime novel about life in America’s last wilderness, the heart-wrenching grief that goes with love, and murder, Midnight Come Again is Dana Stabenow’s best novel to date.