Solid police work in a cold climate.
“It’s just not safe out there,” says a veteran cop colleague—fair warning, however understated. “Out there” is the snow and ice of basically inaccessible northern Alaska, plus a dangerous man that Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active is tracking. Nathan (White Sky, Black Ice, 1999), still regarded as an interloper in Chuckchi, where he’s been stationed for the past two years, has begun to chafe under the description. True, he was raised in citified Anchorage, but Chuckchi is the town of his birth; he’s a full-blooded Eskimo; and being treated as an outsider is no help to an investigator contending with a complex case, particularly when it involves the old ways. Crusty, unpopular Victor Solomon, proprietor of Chuckchi’s village museum, has been found lethally harpooned, and law enforcement has connected the homicide to “Uncle Frosty,” the mummified Eskimo only recently rejected by the Smithsonian due to its callow youth. Uncle Frosty is a mere 40-something, far shy of the centuries he was first assumed to be mellowing. Undeterred, entrepreneurial Victor, convinced of Uncle Frosty’s potential as a tourist attraction, bought him, planning to give him prominence in the museum. But the unseemly display was anathema to a hard core of old-way believers, one of whom probably did him in. So now Nathan finds himself trekking to the far reaches to catch up with the man who probably purloined the mummy, probably harpooned the curator, and probably intends to kill Nathan should he ever complete his journey.
Solid police work in a cold climate.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56946-332-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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