Dana Stabenow

I came to Dana Stabenow via her wonderful Kate Shugak series. Now that I've finished those twenty books and the four in the loosely associate Liam Campbell series, I've turned my attention to her other novels.

"Blindfold Game"is a standalone thriller about a plot to bring harm to the US via the ports on its Alaskan coast.

As a thriller, it works very well: there is a twisty plot, a real sense of threat, and an "I must read one more chapter" pace.

What makes this into a Dana Stabenow thriller is show more the strong characters and the fully-immersive sense of place.

Many thrillers with this kind of premise are black and white affairs, with good Americans fighting to protect the American way of life from crazed fanatics from whatever group are currently at the top of the "We Hate America" list. These can be fun but they can also be very dull.

"Blindfold Game" is different. The "good" Americans do some fairly terrible things, up-close and personal, where the blood covers your clothes and you can feel the breathe from the screams against your skin. The bad guys have reasons. It doesn't make them any less bad but it places them far away from being crazy fanatics. Even the bad guys for hire have a backstory that makes them into real (albeit unpleasant and dangerous) people. This lifts a thriller from the formulaic to the stimulating.

I also liked the way in which Dana Stabenow showed me what life might be like in the US Coastguard. True, she seemed more than a little in love with the Service and its people, to the point where this book is a recruiting officer's dream but that love translates into vivid descriptions of life at sea and strong insights into the culture of the Service.

One of the reasons I read Dana Stabenow's books is because I am fascinated by the strong women she writes. "Blindfold Game" has two of them: a career Coastguard XO who is passionate about the sea and driven to have her own ship but who still can't refrain from saying what she really thinks, even when it affects her career, and a retired war correspondent, now travel writer, who works for the CIA with a chilling efficiency and brutality that she disguises behind an "I'm just an American Grandma on vacation" facade.

This was a fun read. I intend to follow it up with "Prepared For Rage" which is another coastguard-centric thriller by Dana Stabenow. show less

Despite the gloomy title, this is an up-beat Kate Shugak novel and nothing lifts my spirit more than being around Kate Shugak when things are going well.

Of course, up-beat is a relative term. This is a Kate Shugak novel so, although the book is filled with the intense sunshine of humour, love, sexual attraction, practical compassion, moral courage and physical bravery, it is still loomed over by deaths, murders, political intrigue and the impossibility of being able to save everyone.

Dana show more Stabenow’s ability to write (relatively short) novels that make me laugh, cry, become angry and relax in the company of characters who feel like friends continues to astonish me.

In “A Night Too Dark”, Kate gets involved in investigating misdeeds and disappearances at Global Harvests gold mine, strengthens her grip over the Native Association that she chairs, ends up fighting for her life in the Park. It also becomes clear that soon, Kate is going to have to take sides and decide what she really wants to do about the gold mine.

“A Night Too Dark” is the seventeenth Kate Shugak book and yet it is a fresh and energetic as the early books in the series. Of course, I have more history with Kate now. I know how she came by some of her emotional and physical scars. I know who she loves and why. I know when she will feel obliged to act (although that doesn’t mean I can predict what she will do). There is a strong ensemble cast in the Kate Shugak novels but Kate is the sun around which the rest of them revolve.

There is enough in this novel to suggest that next one will be more traumatic. I’ll be there, absorbing every page, because the next best thing after an up-beat Kate Shugak novel is a traumatic Kate Shugak novel. show less

"Prepared For Rage" is Dana Stabenow's second Coastguard thriller. This time we track the slow, indirect but inevitable intersection between Abdullah (literally servant of God) a rogue cell of Al Qaeda, a Coastguard vessel in Florida, and the Space Shuttle.

Although some of the characters are the same as in "Blindfold Game", "Prepared For Rage" works as a standalone novel so feel free to dive right in.

Dana Stabenow makes "Prepared For Rage" more than a terrorist threat thriller by using it as show more a vehicle for topics she is passionate about.

She staunchly defends the value of the Coast Guard, this time highlighting their role in the Katrina aftermath the Coast Guard were almost the only Federal Agency to provide immediate and effect assistance. Her admiration for them is surpassed only by her anger at the Federal agencies that did nothing to help.

Dana Stabenow's long standing love affair with space travel (see her Star Svendotter books) surfaces in a vivid evocation of the astronauts preparing for one of the last (post-Challenger) Space Shuttle missions.

That's pretty much the end of the positive emotions. The FBI, apart from a couple of dedicated but almost disregarded individuals, are shown as inept and crippled by political appointees. The lack of security of US ports is laid like an indictment at the feet of the administration.

For me, the best part of the book was the portrayal of the Al Qaeda terrorist at the centre of the book. While some of the main American characters where as shiny and perfect as American dentistry, the Al Qaeda leader of Abdullah was gritty, twisted, broken and deeply troubling. Dana Stabenow shows us a clever, ruthless, dedicated man, who knows how to recruit people to his campaign and use them to whatever is necessary, regardless of the personal cost. He is an educated man with skills that would allow him to prosper in the West and build a life for himself but who is driven by his mission even when following it means giving up his life to it. The fact that he is disciplined, charismatic, introspective and brave doesn't win us over to his side, it just makes him a more formidable enemy.

As far as plot and suspense goes, this is an above average thriller that kept me guessing (and enjoying guessing) right to the end.

The passion with which Dana Stabenow writes gives the book more power, although, oddly, the most realistic and engaging parts of the novel are not about the Americans trying to do the right thing but about the terrorists who move with such deadly purpose.

Lorelei King does a great job as narrator on this book, managing all the changes in tone and accent perfectly. show less

Book groups and book blogging: two great ways to discover authors you might not otherwise have been aware of.

My crime reading book group recently introduced me to the joys of Dana Stabenow's 'Kate Shugak investigates' series. Set in Alaska it follows the adventures of a retired (but young) District Attorney investigator with four Aleut aunties, a half-wolf, half-husky companion called Mutt and a tough streak a mile wide.

Of course, any crime committed within her local wilderness will show more eventually result in the authorities - this time in the form of hot Trooper Jim - seeking her advice, even if she hasn't been the one to discover the body (and I get the impression that she often is the one who finds the body).

-- What's it about? --

Stabbed, beaten, strangled, drowned. Sometimes people get exactly what they deserve.

Now there's a strapline to lure you in!

Kate first encounters Cal Meany (and oh yes he is) abusing his son by casually backhanding him off a boat into the Pacific Ocean. Twice. Next she spies him engaging in adultery, fishing during a fishing strike and generally being a bastard. So it's safe to say that when he turns up dead, Kate isn't all that sad. Trouble is, nor is anyone else. In fact, fishermen and neighbours alike freely admit that they would shake the hand of Meany's murderer!

As motives for murder pile up and Meany's wife seeks the reassurance of knowing he is definitely dead, Kate and Trooper Jim have to establish who wanted him dead enough to stab him post-beating and drowning.

The game changes when Meany's daughter is murdered and her lover disappears; can Kate catch the killer - or will they catch her?

-- What's it like? --

Atmospheric. Slow-moving. Logical.

Sometimes a blurb can give away a little too much, and as it takes 100 odd pages for Cal Meany to die, it would be easy to get impatient with Stabenow's story-telling. Except. She captures the life of the local people and their attitudes so completely that the opening chapters are a pleasure to read, even though they focus on the act of fishing, gutting, still-beating hearts and all - and I'm a vegetarian.

There's actually not a lot of depth to the main plot here. Once Meany's daughter is murdered and Kate discovers the lover is missing, the pieces fall into place and, like the gentle opening, there's a lengthy closing to the book with the murderer dealt with 26 pages before the end, allowing plenty of time for Shugak to resolve her personal dilemmas and mysteries before the book's end.

I have to admit, I quite liked this approach. Sometimes in books this feels like a cheat - in a really tense thriller you'd be waiting for a bonus twist, or in an ongoing series you might expect to be snagged on a hook for the next book - but in Stabenow's vividly realised Alaskan world you're following Kate Shugak's life, and she just happens to have solved a murder. No big deal, and when's the next fishing session anyway?

-- Final thoughts --

I loved reading about Kate's relationship with her aunts and I like Kate's tough and fiery nature, and her ability to recognise her flaws and make amends. If I was going to be critical I'd focus on her seemingly indestructible nature, but we all know a recurring series heroine cant die, so it would be churlish of me to feel this was a flaw.

I also enjoyed reading about America's 'last frontier' and the characters who dwell there. I shall certainly be keeping an eye out for more of Dana Stabenow's books in this series (a few of the others my group read sounded very appealing), though I'm mindful of her admission that continuity can be a bit error-prone, so I may wait a while before reading another. show less