FROZEN SUN

They call her Amazing Grace and, dead or alive, Alaska state trooper Nathan Active has to find her.

Grace Palmer is a golden child. So smart and so “beautiful from the day she was born,” her father tells state trooper Nathan Active. That’s why, he claims, he named her Grace. But the golden child is gone, dropped out from the university in Anchorage. Why? No one knows, and her parents have stopped asking. Now, however, her dying mother wants desperately to say goodbye. Could Nathan please go to Anchorage to look for her? Our hero is reluctant. For one thing, he’s half convinced she’s dead. A more disconcerting reason is harder to acknowledge, even to himself: He’s been bewitched by her picture. At any rate, in Anchorage he discovers that Amazing Grace, as she’s known in Four Street’s bad bars and dangerous dives, has spiraled downward, her life a dismal history of exploitative men, run-ins with cops, violence and booze. Depressed and discouraged, Nathan sees little hope that she has survived this nonstop array of largely self-inflicted wounds. But Grace is indeed amazing. And unpredictable. And determined. And, as Nathan learns the hard way, oh so tricky.

That rare thing, a deftly plotted mystery that’s also an irresistible love story. With it, Jones’s Alaska series (Shaman Pass, 2003, etc.) takes a quantum leap forward.