A Night Too Dark

In Alaska, somebody disappears every day. Hunters who head into the wilderness… Fishermen who brave the great rivers…Tourists who attempt to do both. In Aleut detective Kate Shugak’s Park, people have been falling off the grid quite a bit lately. And as she and state trooper Jim Chopin are about to realize, it’s got something to do with the recent discovery of the world’s second-largest gold mine in their very own backyard.
A hostile environmental activist organization has embraced Alaska’s Suulutaq Mine as its reason for being, attracting more attention than many of the locals can tolerate. So it’s almost a relief when Kate finally finds a body this, more than politics, she can handle. Until the identity of the body vanishes, too… Now it’s up to Kate and Jim to dig deeper into the mining controversy and find the truth about what’s going on in her homeland. Even if that means facing down an enemy who will kill to keep certain secrets buried…
"Number 79 on the periodic table. “Au,” from the Latin aurum.
The most precious and prized of metals, used for currency beginning with the Egyptian pharaohs in 2700 B.C. and down through the ages by all nations as the metal of choice in the manufacture of those coins of highest value, the aureus, the solidus, the ducat, the guilder, the sovereign, the double eagle, the Krugerrand. A malleable and forgiving metal, an ounce of pure gold can be beaten into a sheet large enough to gild the roof of a small home, although it is more dense than lead. It doesn’t corrode, which makes it perfect for jewelry, although in its pure state it is too soft to stand up to repeated use and so is alloyed with other metals copper, silver, nickel, or palladium so that a wedding ring will last through a golden anniversary. Gold is tasteless, although in the 1500s a Dutchman invented a liqueur called Goldwasser in which he sprinkled gold flakes. Medieval chefs used gold to garnish sweets before sending them up to the high tables.
Gold is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and resistant to oxidation and corrosion, making it useful in electronics and dentistry. It was used to plate the copper disk of recorded greetings on board Voyager 1, a hundred astronomical units out and counting. It is included in speculative designs for solar sails for spaceships and solar collectors for space habitats. Scientists have built gold nanospheres to work with lasers on a cure for cancer."