Play With Fire

Formerly the star investigator in the Anchorage D.A's office, Kate Shugak now tracks down criminals from her Aleut homestead. But she and her wolf-dog Mutt are taking a June break to pick wild morel mushrooms among the charred trees left by a devastating forest fire. In the ashes Kate also uncovers the mysterious corpse of a naked man. And when she is "hired" by a ten-year-old to locate his missing dad, she fears she has already found him. The reason how and why he died, however, is buried deeper than his body. Finding it will lead Kate to the remains of a woolly mammoth in a Fairbanks museum, back to her old lover Jack Morgan, and far afield to an isolated settlement of religious fundamentalists ... as she follows a twisted road toward a smoldering evil and the flash point for a macabre murder. The fifth Kate Shugak mystery, Play With Fire contains all of Stabenow's hallmarks of ingenious plotting and vivid characterizations. Best of all, it is again set in magnificently austere, endlessly fascinating Alaska, which comes to life through the authentic details only a true insider can provide.
"Kate's jeans were wet to the thigh. Sweat was pooling at the base of her spine. It felt like eighty degrees on this Thursday afternoon in late June. The sun wasn't setting until it got good and ready-at this time of year not until midnight--and she'd had enough of existentialism two pages into No Exit and three weeks into English 211 at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks fourteen years before. She pushed back a strand of black hair, leaving another streak of soot on her cheek, and hoisted the bucket. Ten feet away sat a second white plastic bucket, similarly full, and she headed toward it with grim determination."