North of Montana
Subtitle: a novel
By: by April Smith.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf; Distributed by Random House
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 295
Subjects: Women detectives -- California -- Los Angeles -- Fiction; Government investigators -- Fiction; Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Fiction
Description: Ana Grey thinks of herself as a "full-blooded optimistic American." She's a young, ambitious, irreverent, tough-minded FBI agent based in Los Angeles. She's been with the Bureau for seven years, is good at what she does, and after she pulls off "the most amazing arrest of the year" is sure she finally has her ticket to a transfer and promotion.

But for a woman to walk into the squad supervisor's office is "like entering a deep freeze." He snags her on a technical detail. Instead of a promotion she gets an official reprimand - and as a test, a high-profile case involving the fading but still-beloved movie star Jayne Mason, a well-known doctor, and an allegedly illegal supply of drugs passing between them. All the elements are right there for Ana to put in the proper order. Simple, straightforward, easy to wrap up...

Or so she's given to believe. But it's not long before she discovers that the doctor had employed a distant cousin of hers - a woman Ana never knew, a woman who has recently been brutally murdered.

And it doesn't take her much longer to understand that in the eyes of her higher-ups "Jayne Mason is not a case, Jayne Mason is a...political situation waiting to explode." Now, as pressure builds to resolve the case, Ana and her partner, Mike (the "most married" man she thought she knew), are drawn closer and closer together, and the boundaries between her private and professional lives begin to blur.

And as Ana fights to prevent the case from making its way deep into her psyche, her world, her life - into the long-hidden recesses of her family's mysterious past and into her conflicted present - North of Montana becomes something more: a riveting exploration of power and identity in an explosive culture. North of Montana is an electrifying novel of psychological acuity and unfaltering suspense, the debut of an assured and powerful storyteller - a stunning new voice in fiction.