Bad Blood (Kate Shugak Mysteries)
*Starred Review* In the twentieth novel in the Kate Shugak series, the part-time private investigator teams with her friend and occasional lover, Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin, to try to solve the murder of a young man. It’s a complicated situation. The murdered man lived in the village of Kushtaka, and the prime suspect lives in the neighboring village of Kuskulana. The two villages have been bitter rivals for a long time (Kushtaka is a traditional Alaskan village; Kuskulana is more modern and more prosperous), and the elders of neither village seem interested in helping Jim and Kate get to the bottom of things. Jim, a representative of the state, is counting on Kate’s tribal connections to help smooth the investigation, but Kate, a native Aleut, soon discovers her connections don’t seem to mean much here. Long-time devotees of this popular series will devour the book in a single sitting, and if there happen to be any fans of Alaska-set mystery fiction—books by John Straley, for example, or Sue Henry—who have not yet made the acquaintance of Kate Shugak, they should change that sooner rather than later. --David Pitt