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A Kate Shugak Novel
by Dana Stabenow
Book Reviewed by:A Deeper Sleep is the fifteen volume in
the Kate Shugak series, so the series is likely to be familiar
to many readers at this point. However, the nature of series
such as this is that unless the author becomes a seriously
heavy-weight household name there are always far more people who
have yet to discover her than already know her; and the absence
of such a prolific and well-thought of author from BookBrowse's
lists was something that needed to be rectified!
The fifteenth installment has been a surprisingly long time
coming - after turning out at least one book a year between 1992
and 2004, Stabenow took a 2 year hiatus to work on her first
standalone novel, Blindfold Game (2006), a rip-roaring
sea-going adventure/political thriller, which launched her on to
the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. A second stand-alone novel is due in February 2008.
Like all of the Kate Shugak novels, and in fact, like all of
Stabenow's books, A Deeper Sleep is set in Alaska, a
place she knows extremely well having been born and brought up
on a 75-foot fish tender working in the Gulf of Alaska by her
single-mother, only moving to shore in 8th grade. As you know,
Alaska is a very big place, about 1/5 the size of the entire
continental United States with
more coastline than the entire continental USA, and Kate
Shugak has covered plenty of it through the series as you'll see
from this
map. However, this time, the action takes place in
Niniltna, close to Kate's home.
Kate, an Aleut*, lives on a 160-acre homestead in a fictitious
national Park in Alaska. Her roommate is a half-wolf, half-husky
dog named Mutt. Her nearest neighbors are a bull moose and a
grizzly sow. Farther off are dog mushers, miners, hunters,
trappers, fishermen, bush pilots, pipeline workers, Park rats
and Park rangers, other Aleuts, Athabascans, a few Tlingits and
the residents of the fictional village of Niniltna, perched on
the edge of the Kanuyaq River**, a 600-mile long, salmon-rich
tributary that winds through the Park to Prince William Sound.
From what we can gather this places Kate's home somewhere between Cordova
and Tok close to the Bay of Alaska, not all that far, relatively
speaking, from Soldovia, where Stabenow lived for part of her
childhood.
All the elements that have made this series so popular are
present in force in this latest volume, most vividly the Alaskan
environment and the strong female protagonist who has seen
considerable growth since the early books, both as a woman and
as a private investigator. As Publishers Weekly (in their
starred review) put it "there is rough humor, a rich heritage of
the community necessary for survival, and at the same time a
remarkable tolerance for the many idiosyncrasies of those
attracted to the harsh realities of Alaskan life. Kate Shugak is
becoming a leader among her people and is already a leader in
the sorority of women detectives."
If you enjoy books by the likes of Nevada Barr but have yet to
experience Dana Stabenow's writing, pick up a copy of A
Deeper Sleep sometime soon, or look out for books from
earlier in the series which will undoubtedly be widely available
in new and used bookstores (see the sidebar for a bibliography).
*The Aleut are the indigenous people of
the Aleutian Islands, a chain of more than 300 small volcanic
islands, with 57 active volcanoes, that form an arc westward
from the Alaska Peninsula which are mostly connected together by
a ferry system known as
The
Alaska Marine Highway. Most of the archipelago is in Alaska,
but a few of the most western islands are part of Russia. The
Aleutian Islands are both the westernmost part of the United
States and also, technically speaking, the easternmost (a feat
achieved because they cross longitude 180°. The Prime
Meridian/0° is measured from Greenwich in London; thus any point
that lies exactly on the 180th meridian is neither east nor
west, but step a foot on either side and you are either at the
most westerly point on the map or the most easterly!).
**The Kanuyaq River does not appear on maps. However, the Copper
River does, and appears to match the location of Stabenow's
Kanuyaq. Added to which kanuyaq is the Aleutian word for
copper!
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2007, and has been updated for the
January 2008 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
If you liked A Deeper Sleep, try these:
by Stan Jones
Published 2011
Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active must figure out what connects a dead hunter on a remote Arctic lake with a deadly series of events.
by Tony Hillerman
Published 2006
The stakes are high and the danger escalates clear through to the final pages. Hillerman continues to shine as the best of the West.
Winterkill: A Joe Pickett Novel
by C.J. Box
Published 2004
Steeped in the sharp cliffs and the brutal wilderness of the Wyoming landscape, this is a masterful performance - a darkly compelling and utterly unforgettable classic mystery.
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