HELL AND HIGH WATER

Storms, secrets, and murder complicate a lawyer’s life in Alaska in the third Maeve Malloy mystery by Anchorage-based attorney Powell, the author of Hemlock Needle (2019).

Maeve Malloy is at a crossroads. She was briefly suspended from the bar after a hangover caused her to mishandle a legal case, and now that she’s free to return to practicing law, Malloy isn’t yet ready to go back to being a public defender. Bills wait for no one, however, and she takes a job as a kitchen helper at Fox Island Lodge outside Seward. Upon arriving, Malloy finds the lodge to be low on people, with just a couple of staff members and a handful of guests. The morning after a stormy night, the already small number drops by one when a murder victim is found outside. Due to the weather, the state troopers can’t reach the lodge, so Malloy steps in to bag the evidence and take witness statements. Unpleasant secrets come to light, and Malloy has to deal with vengeful parties, a hungrily bold bear, and at least one person whose sanity is very much in question. The majestic natural beauty of Alaska might seem like an unusual backdrop for a crime series in which the protagonist is an attorney, but without descending into cliché, Powell uses the setting and culture of Alaska deftly, showing the individualism and looser perspective on justice that draw people to a land still seen as a frontier by many. Malloy is a fully rounded creation: smart and careful yet struggling with alcoholism and self-doubt, she is both capable and believably flawed. The complications emerge in realistic ways so that even aspects that seem unlikely—such as having a nonpracticing attorney essentially open a police investigation—come across as natural to the narrative and not authorial contrivance. Background information is doled out steadily, and while there is a central mystery, the focus of the story is more on exploring the history of a family and those connected to it in intimate, terrible ways. This narrative thrust frees the book from the stereotypical genre constructions and allows the tale to go in directions that would be more constrained in a purely genre exercise.

Sturdy plot elements and a multidimensional protagonist make this mystery an involving read.