The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood
Page 92
Dana’s Wikipedia entry gives the following description of the series, and since they do it a lot more succinctly than I can, I’ll let them:
Kate Shugak is a Native Alaskan, an Aleut, living in a fictional national park in Alaska, based loosely on the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve. Formerly an investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney’s office, an incident during which she is badly injured on the job causes her to quit and return home to live on her own. Regular characters in the Shugak series include:
• Mutt, Kate’s part-wolf dog
• Jack Morgan, Anchorage District Attorney, and Kate’s lover for the first nine books
• Ekatarina Shugak, Kate’s grandmother
• Bobby Clark, Vietnam vet and ham operator
• Dan O’Brien, Ranger assigned to the Park
• Sgt. Jim Chopin, a State Trooper assigned to the Park
Shugak stories:
* A Cold Day for Murder (1992) (the first in the Kate Shugak series)—A park ranger is missing, and so is the investigator the Anchorage police sent in to look for him. Kate’s ex-boss and ex-lover, Jack Morgan, convinces her to investigate their disappearances on her own terms, beginning her new career as a private investigator. This book introduces us to main characters that will remain constants in the books to come and sets the tone for the coming books. The storyline establishes the relationship between Kate and Jack and gives some background information and insight into their relationship.
* A Fatal Thaw (1992)—A killer claims eight victims but nine bodies were found lying in the snow.
* Dead in the Water (1993)—Kate hires on as a deckhand on a crabber where two former deckhands mysteriously disappeared. This novel talks about life on a crab fishing boat and the dangers on the sea.
* A Cold-Blooded Business (1994)—A novel that talks about life in the oil fields above the Arctic Circle has Kate looking into drug smuggling and finding other illegal situations as well.
* Play with Fire (1995)—While picking mushrooms, Kate and her friends stumble upon the body of the son of the leader of a religious sect.
* Blood Will Tell (1996)—Mostly set at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention, which Kate attends at the insistence of her grandmother, Kate looks into the death of one of the local village’s board members.
* Breakup (1997)—Breakup is the season of early Spring, when the rivers and ground start to thaw and people can start spending more time outdoors again. Kate looks into the death of a woman by a bear that doesn’t quite add up.
* Killing Grounds (1998)—Set in the summer fishing season of salmon, Kate investigates the death of a fellow fisherman while working as a deckhand on a tender.
* Hunter’s Moon (1999)—Kate and Jack take on a job to escort a group of business men and woman into the park trophy hunting.
* Midnight Come Again (2000)—After the events in the previous novel, Kate has gone missing from her home and friends.
* The Singing of the Dead (2001)—Kate hires on to protect the life of a candidate for Alaskan State Senator.
* A Fine and Bitter Snow (2002)—A novel that talks about oil drilling in a wildlife preserve, Kate looks into an attack on two friends of her late grandmother.
* A Grave Denied (2003)—Some students on a field trip discover a body in the mouth of a glacier.
* A Taint in the Blood (2004)—A woman hires Kate to clear her mother of a thirty year old murder, but the mother doesn’t want to be cleared.
* A Deeper Sleep (2007)—Kate tries to get a conviction on a repeat offender while her tribal elders try to get her to take a more solid role in the tribe.
* Whisper to the Blood (2009)—A world-class gold mine is discovered in the Park at almost the same moment Kate is whipsawed by the Aunties into a seat on the local Native association board of directors.
* A Night Too Dark (2010)
* Though Not Dead (2011)
* Restless in the Grave (2012)
* Bad Blood (2013)
I’ve read all of the Kate Shugak books and love them; I’ve seldom met a more dependable author, in term both of productivity and quality.
I like Dana’s Liam Campbell series even better (the German translator who has worked on both our books, and has read all Dana’s mysteries, says that Liam Campbell is the closest thing she’s seen to a modern-day Jamie Fraser—and the sex is particularly good in those), but the four Campbell books are unfortunately out of print at the moment and no more under contract, which is a shame—but they are available in a Kindle edition, which is great news!
Dana also has a new series of historical novels based on the journeys of Marco Polo (and his descendants), which I’m sure are also terrific, but I haven’t yet read them, so can’t offer much in the way of description.
So here’s a tiny bit of A Night Too Dark:
She heaved a martyr’s sigh. “All right,” she said, as they had both known she would. “I’ll find him and talk to him for you. I’d like to see this Lothario for myself, anyway.”
She came around the counter and sauntered toward him. He admired her while she did so. Yeah, maybe she didn’t have the figure Laurel had, but when she wanted to, Kate could telegraph her intentions in a way that was little less than incitement to riot. Jim had watched plenty of women walk in his lifetime, both toward him and away, and he had never appreciated the amalgamation of brain and bone, muscle and flesh the way he did when it came wrapped in this particular package.
“Beat it,” she said to Mutt.
Mutt flounced over to the fireplace, scratched the aunties’ quilt into a pile, turned around three times, and curled up with her back most pointedly toward them.
Kate smiled down at Jim. Just like that, Jim got hard. And she knew it, he could tell by the deepening indentations at the corners of that wide, full-lipped mouth. “Jesus, woman,” he said. If he wasn’t flustered, it was as close as he ever got.
“What can I say,” she said. “I have special powers.” He was pulled to a sitting position with a fistful of shirt and she climbed aboard.
(My husband caught sight of one of Dana’s books on the kitchen table, asked me what it was, and upon being told that it was a murder mystery set in Alaska, exclaimed, “And her name is Stab-’em-now?! What a great name for a mystery writer!” Alas, it’s really pronounced STAB-uh-no, but still great books.)
See more about Dana at http://www.stabenow.com/.
Pandaemonium, by Christopher Brookmyre
I seldom write fan letters to other authors. Not that I don’t want to; there are lots of wonderful books that move me to admiration, laughter, tears, etc., and I’d love to let the authors of them know that. In some cases, the authors in question are dead, though, which kind of renders a fan letter moot, though I do Say a Word during my evening rosary—that was my Lenten devotion this year, saying the rosary every night (provided I don’t fall asleep in the middle; lovely, peaceful meditation). In most cases, though, I just don’t get around to it. You know, busy life, obligations, family, dogs, book tours, saying the rosary, answering the nice messages people send me, etc., etc.
Which is why I particularly appreciate the letters and emails people send me; I know just how much effort it takes to actually do something like that, rather than just think about it. So it’s all the more remarkable that upon reading Christopher Brookmyre’s Pandaemonium recently, I put down the book and actually wrote him a fan letter. Which said:
Dear Christopher–
I’ve just finished wallowing in Pandaemonium, pausing occasionally to gasp with admiration at your sheer technical brilliance (we’ll take the tremendous energy, amazing ear for dialogue and eye for social dynamics, and your talent for chronic hilarity (ranging from subtle to belly-laugh) as read). All of which is nothing to my enjoyment of the way your mind works. I couldn’t have done a clearer explanation of just what science is (and how it works) myself—and I do it frequently, what with the appalling st
ate of prevalent ignorance and the many practitioners thereof. And the sheer bloody brilliance, not only of the concept, but the ending…!
I’ve been enjoying your books for years, and you’ve been getting better and better, juggling the ideas so deftly with the satire and the plot (speaking of juggling, I adore your magician from The Sacred Art of Stealing and Snowball in Hell, too). This one is Just Great. Thanks so much.
—Diana
So, anyway, still in the grip of this unaccustomed burst of energy, I thought I’d mention Chris as the latest recommendation on the Methadone List, and an excellent one he is, too—not only for the quality of his books but the quantity, as well; he produces something close to a book a year (a feat that excites my envious admiration).
Brookmyre’s books are all violent, bloody, and absolutely hilarious. They’re not a single series; some of the books feature a recurring main character, the journalist Jack Parlabane, two of them have a wonderful, emotionally vulnerable, light-fingered magician as the hero (I fell in love with him, and I have high standards in that department), and some are one-off stand-alones. Recently, he’s begun a fascinating new series featuring one Jasmine Sharp, an accidental investigator who manages to cope with everything she meets—and will, along the way, teach you how to stick your thumb in someone’s eye socket and purée their brain—and Catherine McLeod, a police officer with a complicated family life and a grim sense both of duty and of humor. ALL of them are wonderfully plotted, deeply satirical, and done with a distinctly Scottish sense of humor.
Hope you enjoy Chris as much as I have!
And here’s his website, too, which has brief excerpts from some of his books: http://www.brookmyre.co.uk.
BESIDES THE WEBSITE listings, I thought I’d add a few more of my longtime favorite series books here:
John le Carré—the Smiley trilogy
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Honourable Schoolboy
Smiley’s People
(N.B.: There are other le Carré novels that include the character of George Smiley, but these three novels form the heart of this Cold Warrior’s world.)
These books were published quite a few years ago (they’re set in the 1960s and ’70s), but perhaps the world has now reached the point where this particular spy trilogy can effectively be read as historical fiction. Groundbreaking in style and deeply engrossing, le Carré’s early spy fiction is some of the best literature of its period. His characters are painfully human, and the milieu he draws from is claustrophobic, achingly lonely—and very dangerous.
C. C. Humphreys
C. C. Humphreys’s latest historical crime novel, Plague, has deservedly won the 2015 Arthur Ellis Award (Best Crime Novel in Canada). A historical novelist whose subjects range from Anne Boleyn (The French Executioner) to Vlad the Impaler (Vlad), his specialty is roaring-good tales based on a research so well done as to seem nearly invisible but which invests all his stories with a sense of such immediacy that you close each book with a feeling of satisfaction in the story—and a sense of relief that you live in the twenty-first century.
I am myself particularly fond of his Jack Absolute series, which follows the adventures of Captain Jack Absolute, described as an 18th-century 007 lifted from Richard Sheridan’s play The Rivals, who has a “talent for trouble,” a rogue’s way with women and more lives than a cat,3 but I’ve found all his books to be a deep and constant pleasure.
P. F. Chisholm
Patricia Finney (writing as P. F. Chisholm) is one of my very favorite historical novelists, and her Robert Carey series is a sheer delight. Firmly based on Carey—a real-life Elizabethan courtier whose biography is as adventurous as Chisholm’s novels (if less detailed)—the books are also tremendously engaging and remarkably funny, without at any time straying into comic-novel territory. The humor as well as the plots spring from Chisholm’s grace with characters.
At the moment, there are seven Robert Carey novels, beginning with A Famine of Horses. These are, for the most part, set on the dangerous Border between England and Scotland and involve feuding surnames (the Border equivalent of clans), political treachery, murder, desire (requited and un-), and the ineffable Sergeant Henry Dodd, with whom I am deeply in love.
As Patricia Finney, she also has a wonderful trilogy (also set in Elizabethan times), longer and more detailed than the Carey books and closer to the Queen in plot and substance but equally entertaining:
Unicorn’s Blood
Firedrake’s Eye
Gloriana’s Torch
Violent Wee Buggers
I don’t know what it is about Celtic writers, but they seem to have the simultaneous gifts of poetry and majorly gruesome imagination—which is, of course, a combination I personally find irresistible. Here are some of my favorite crime writers—mostly Scots, with an Irishman thrown in, and one American who, whatever his ethnic heritage, has the gift of poetic grue, in spades.
Ian Rankin
Ian’s gotten to be very well known in Scottish literary circles (and is a cover boy for the National Trust of Scotland’s publications—yay, Ian!) for his series of crime novels starring Inspector John Rebus. These are police procedurals, set in Edinburgh (and invariably described as “gritty”). Like any good crime books, they deal not only with the solution of the crime but with the detective’s personal life and how it’s affected by his/her pursuit of evil. Rebus is a fascinatingly flawed character, whose personal life outside his career is largely nonexistent—lonely, cranky, obsessed, alcoholic—but is redeemed by his obstinacy and by the friends who stick by him despite his flaws.
For best effect, the novels should be read in (rough) order, so you can follow the evolution (and convolutions) of Rebus’s private life. They can be read as stand-alones, though, since each novel is a well-structured and self-contained investigation.
Adrian McKinty
McKinty is the Irishman, who debuted with a stunning trilogy (the “Dead” trilogy—very accurate): Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, and The Bloomsday Dead. All three books deal with the (grisly, hyper-violent, blood-soaked) adventures of a young Irish gangster who comes to New York, promptly runs into trouble—and stays in it. Not for the weak of stomach, but both characters and language are exquisite.
The same is true for his later Sean Duffy books, set in Ireland during the Troubles: The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, and Gun Street Girl.
Val McDermid
Val does books that could best be described as thrillers (though they do have the structure of murder mysteries, for the most part), because they move a mile a minute. Most are stand-alones, though two or three have recurrent main characters. The outstanding feature of all of them is the absolutely horrible psychopathic villains she writes and the ghastly things they do. She’s also written a series of much milder mysteries (the Kate Brannigan series), though I prefer (naturally) the grisly ones.
Stuart MacBride
Stuart MacBride’s Logan McRae series is set in Aberdeen and, besides having a wonderful sense of place, is grossly violent, blood-soaked—and hilarious. He has the best characters, from the massive, candy-munching DI Inch to the cadaverous, chain-smoking lesbian DI Steele, who is the bane of McRae’s professional life. To say nothing of criminals given to snipping off people’s fingers joint by joint and forcing them to swallow the pieces…I really wasn’t kidding about the heading of this list. You Have Been Warned. Great stuff, though!
Don Winslow (Honorary Wee Bugger)
Don Winslow is an American, and I strongly recommend all his books, from earlier titles like The Death and Life of Bobby Z and the Neal Carey series (A Cool Breeze on the Underground, etc.), which are great but not unduly violent, up to the amazing California Fire and Life and The Power of the Dog—which are. Wonderful characters, plots, and writing—but not, repeat NOT, for the weak of stomach.
* * *
1 Quoted by permission of the publisher: Orbit/Gollancz
2 “P
eople Picks: A Dozen Cool Things to See, Hear, Read and Download This Week,” edited by Tom Gliatto, Steven J. Snyder, and Kim Hubbard. The Long Way Home is listed under “Number 2: Best New Books.” Volume 82, Number 10.
3 Publishers Weekly.
PART ELEVEN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
n the first volume of The Outlandish Companion, I included a fairly extensive bibliography, listing about six hundred books and references that I’d used during the writing of the first four novels. A couple of years ago, I asked my assistant (the invaluable Ms. Susan Pittman-Butler) to catalog my core reference collection (the books that normally live in my office) into the LibraryThing website, in order to make the references easily available to readers who want to go more deeply into the historical background of the novels or some of the historical personalities mentioned therein. Currently, there are about 2,200 books listed in my personal “library” on that site.
That’s a lotta books. If I included all of them in a bibliography for this volume, I’m afraid there wouldn’t have been room for anything else—and not everyone is that passionately interested in the background research.
So I decided to do two things: 1) provide you with a brief description of how to use the LibraryThing website to look at my listings—which will give you access to the entire bibliography and allow you to sort the listings in accordance with your own particular interests, and 2) print here a brief bibliography that represents the books currently on my “core” shelves.
The core shelves are two shelves of my large built-in bookcase, on which I gradually collect books that I think may be of particular use during the writing of the current novel(s). (At the time of publication of Outlandish Two, I’m in the early stages of work on Book Nine—so called because it’s untitled; titles kind of come along in their own good time.) The books on the core shelves tend to stay there during the two to three years that I’m working on the novel for which they’re supplying background. These aren’t the only books I consult while working on a specific novel (not by a long shot…), but things like herbals, medical references, field guides, etc., all have their own locations in the larger collection and are easy to find when I need one. The core shelves are for the oddball reference that might come in handy (at the moment, I don’t have any African Muslims in Book Nine; I just think I might, at some point), the biography of some real person that I expect to use (Banastre Tarleton, Peggy Shippen, Benedict Arnold, George Washington, Joseph Brant, John André, etc.—though I won’t have any idea how much information I may require or find useful from these), interesting “overview” books (such as White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal People and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America), interesting first-person accounts (Scottish and Irish Diaries), eyewitness accounts and information of specific historical events, particularly battles (The Siege of Charleston, The Road to Guilford Courthouse, etc.), and so on.