A Grave Denied: A Kate Shugak Novel

by Dana Stabenow

Overview

Everyone knew Len Dreyer, a handyman for hire in the Park near Niniltna, Alaska, but no one knew anything else about him. Even Kate Shugak hired him to thin the trees on her 160-acre homestead and was planning to ask him to help build a small second cabin on her property for Johnny Morgan, a teenaged boy in her care. But she, the Park's unofficial p.i., seems to have known less about him than anyone.

Alaska is a place where anybody can bury his history and start fresh, and for any reason, but this particular mystery comes to light when Len Dreyer turns up murdered. His body is discovered, frozen solid, in the path of a receding glacier with the hole from a shotgun blast in his chest. No one even knew he was missing, but it turns out he's been missing for months.

Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin asks Kate to help him dig into Dreyer's background, in the hope of finding some reason for his murder. She takes the case, mindful of the need for gainful employment as she copes with her responsibility for Johnny, a constant reminder of his father, her dead lover. Little does she imagine that by trying to provide for him she just might put him right in the path of danger.

A talented writer at the prime of her abilities, Stabenow delivers a masterful crime novel that turns out to be as much about living as it is about dying.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429909174
Publisher:	St. Martin''s Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/2007
Series:	Kate Shugak Series , #13
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	22,257
File size:	370 KB

About the Author

Dana Stabenow, award-winning author of twelve previous Kate Shugak mysteries, three Liam Campbell mysteries, and three science fiction novels, also writes an acclaimed column for Alaska magazine. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, where she was born and raised.

Read an Excerpt

Ms. Doogan waited for the laughter to die down. “Think about this, boys and girls,” she said, waving a hand at the glacier.

"Seventy-five years ago? This little strip of beach we're picnicking on was under the glacier. That's right, under a big slab of ice just like that one. Your grandmas and grandpas couldn't have had a school picnic here." Eyes widened, measured the distance between the face of the glacier, a wall of ice a hundred feet high, and their beachfront picnic site. "Mother Nature doesn't waste time in the Kanuyaq River basin. How many of you remember last summer, when Grant Glacier thrust forward right over the lake?"

Blank looks all around. Ms. Doogan tried not to let her ex-asperation show. These kids were living in the middle of a ge-ological experiment in progress. If only she could get some of them to notice, they could go on to make a living from it one day.

They finished lunch and set out to explore. Ms. Doogan in-sisted that they go in groups of two or larger and stay in sight of her at all times, but beyond that they were free to wander as they chose, which added to the sense of it being more like a day off. Eric Kizzia ripped pages from his notebook and made paper sailboats to float in the lake, gathering other students to make a regatta out of it. Mary Lindbeck sat with her hands clasped around her knees and her face turned up to the sun. Others stretched out, some making notes, some napping.

"Hey, look, here's a trail," Johnny said. "It looks like it goes around the lake to the mouth of the glacier. Want to go?"

"Sure," Vanessa said.

"I'll go, too," Andrea said.

"And me," Betty said.

Andrea scowled.

Betty blinked.

Johnny and Vanessa exchanged martyred looks. Johnny led off, with Vanessa behind. Somewhere along the route Andrea elbowed Vanessa to the rear. She tried to walk next to Johnny but the trail was too narrow, so instead she relied on tripping and slipping a lot. "Thanks," she said, the third time it happened. She smiled up at him as she used his hand to pull herself upright.

"Sorry to be so clumsy." She turned the smile on Vanessa, who looked more than usually wooden of face.
The next time Andrea tripped, Johnny stepped nimbly out of reach and Andrea went down on both knees. She didn't mind bleeding as much as she minded getting blood on her brand- new Gap khakis. Her language was unladylike.

"Sorry about that," Johnny said, only he didn't sound sorry at A. "Hey, Van, look at this. Is this a lupine?"

Betty shoved past both of them and peered at the slender green shoots, comparing them to the copy of Pratt's Field Guide to Alaskan Wildflowers she held open before her on the palms of both hands, like a priest consulting a sacred scroll. "Lupinus arc-ticus," she announced in the manner of one handing down a prophecy. "Of the pea or Fabaccae family. A perennial, which means it comes back every year."

They gazed at her, stunned into silence by an oblivious self-assurance that allowed Betty to be convinced that they were as spellbound by the subject as she was. "The arctic lupine grows ten to sixteen inches tall, prefers dry slopes, fields, and roadsides, and is not to be confused with the Nootka lupine, which grows in Southeastern, Southcentral, and on the Chain." She frowned down at the plants. "I can't tell which this is. The pictures only show them in bloom." She displayed the book accusingly.

"Yup, that's lupine," Johnny said, and Vanessa quickly fol-lowed his lead. "Lupine, definitely."

Once more Andrea brushed ineffectually at the knees of her khakis and muttered dire imprecations to the fashion gods.

Johnny watched her for a moment, and said, "Want to get closer to the glacier?" "Sure," Vanessa said, measuring the distance. "Can we?" "Sure, the trail looks like it goes right up to it." "It could fall on us," Andrea said. "We won't get that close," Johnny said. Andrea hesitated, and he shrugged and turned, saying over his shoulder, "Stay behind if you want."

Vanessa and Betty swung out onto the path behind him. An-drea bit her lip, and followed.

It was rough and rocky going, with treacherous bits of ice cleverly hidden by glacial silt only revealing themselves when trodden upon. A faint, translucent fog seemed to be rising up out of the face of the glacier, looming large and blue in front of them.

They heard a faint cry, and looked around to see Ms. Doogan waving at them from the beach. "Did you hear her?" Johnny said.
i0
"Hear who?" Vanessa said.

"We'd better go back, we could get in trouble," Andrea said.

Betty, caught between a natural inclination to succumb to authority and a congenital compulsion to amass scientific data, wavered.

"Come on," Johnny said. "We're almost there."

In the end the four of them approached the foot of the glacier together. Where the moraine ended, the leading edge of ice had eroded into a yawning black cave, shallow, dark from the silt and dirt embedded in it, an enormous, engulfing shadow in om-inous contrast to the bright, sunny day a few feet away. It was melting so fast that the runoff sounded like rain. The gravel beneath, rounded smooth by millennia of glacial erosion, was wet and shiny. The cold and the moisture hit their faces like a slap.

-ies like standing in front of an open refrigerator," Andrea said.

Johnny didn't look at Vanessa, the same way she didn't look at him. Andrea lived in Niniltna, where they had electricity com-ing out of every wall plug. She didn't live on a homestead, like he did, or on a defunct roadhouse site like Vanessa, or in the middle of a bison farm like Betty. Townies just had no clue.

Johnny peered into the interior. "Whoa," Betty said. "You don't want to get too close." She pointed. "The face is calving all the time. Look at all that fallen stuff. Some of those pieces are pretty big. You don't want to get hit."

"Darn right we don't," Andrea said tartly. "Okay, we've been here, done that, let's go back."

"There's someone in there," Johnny said.

"Oh, come on," Andrea said with a playful slap at his shoul-der. "Stop kidding around."

"I'm not kidding," Johnny said, "there's somebody inside, un-der the glacier."

"What?" Betty and Vanessa crowded next to him, peering into the gloom. "Where?"

"Right there."

They followed the direction indicated by his pointing finger, and out of the dim a figure coalesced, a dark outline, vaguely human, sitting bolt upright with its back to the ice where the ice curved in to meet the gravel. The figure appeared to be clothed. At least no flesh was gleaming whitely at them.

It also wasn't moving. "Um, hello?" Johnny said.

It didn't move. "Hello, you there inside the glacier," Betty said in an unconscious imitation of Ms. Doogan's authoritarian accents. "You need to come out from under the glacier. It could fall on you."

At that moment a shard of roughly the size of a bronto-saurus calved from the face of the glacier and smashed to the earth outside in a thousand pieces, one of which narrowly missed Andrea, which, after her own heart settled down, Vanessa -thought was a dam shame. They all jumped and bumped into each other. Johnny swore. Andrea, of course, screamed. "You guys are nuts, you re all going to get squished! There's no one in there, no one would be crazy enough to go in there! I'm going back to the lake!"

The other three heard the sound of rapidly receding feet. The opening into the ice was still free. "Hello?" Johnny repeated. "You need to come out of there, whoever you are."

There was no response.

"Maybe they're dead," Vanessa said, articulating the thought uppermost in all their minds. "We should check."
She stepped inside then open mouth of the cave. After a momentary hesitation, Johnny and Betty followed.

As they approached the sitting figure, their eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was a man, dressed in worn jeans and a Carhartt’s jacket. His face was the blue-white of the face of the glacier, veined and mottled.

The hole in his chest was the size of a basketball.

Copyright 2003 by Dana Stabenow

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"One of the strongest voices in crime fiction." -Seattle Times

"Stabenow is a fine storyteller, but it is her passion for the Alaskan landscape and the iconoclastic people who inhabit it that fires this series and lifts this latest entry to its pinnacle." -Publishers Weekly

"Every time I think Dana Stabenow has gotten as good as she can get, she comes up with something better." —The Washington Times

"The skillful Ms. Stabenow has created a believable, well-defined character in Kate and placed her in a setting so beautiful that the crimes she investigates seem almost sacrilegious...this is Ms. Stabenow's 13th Kate Shugak novel, and they just get better and better."—Dallas Morning News

"A gifted few are able to employ the setting as something more, an ingredient that adds texture and tone and lifts the story out of the commonplace and into the rare...to these, add Dana Stabenow...this is the 13th volume in the Kate Shugak series, which, unlike many, keeps improving with age-due in large measure to Stabenow's splendid evocation of the Alaskan landscape."—San Diego Union-Tribune

"The characters literally come alive to bring you into this fast-paced thriller, which will keep you turning the pages of this high-voltage mystery."—Rendezvous

Editorial Reviews

After a dozen mysteries featuring Aleut sleuth Kate Shugak, including the Edgar-winning debut A Cold Day for Murder (1992), Stabenow's framework remains simple, sound and effective. Take a strong-willed, independent woman and pit her against the beautiful and dangerous Alaskan wilderness and those, mainly men, who try to compromise her independence. Give her a faithful companion, Mutt, a half-wolf mixed breed, and an abiding sense of loyalty and fair play. One of the pleasures of the series is the tension that arises from the characters' need for both privacy and dependence on others. The result is closeness without intimacy, superbly illustrated when the body of Len Dreyer, town handyman, turns up at the mouth of a glacier. Only then does it become clear that the victim was a complete cipher. Challenges and changes also mark Kate's relationships with teenager Johnny Morgan, son of her late lover, Jack Morgan, and with state trooper Jim Chopin. Kate's professional training and investigative skills make her an able adjunct for the undermanned state police, but this time her efforts render her and Johnny and Mutt targets for a killer. Stabenow is a fine storyteller, but it is her passion for the Alaskan landscape and the iconoclastic people who inhabit it that fires this series and lifts this latest entry to its pinnacle. (Sept. 8) FYI: Stabenow is also the author of the Liam Campbell (Nothing Gold Can Stay) and the Star Svensdotter (Red Planet Run) mystery series. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Kate Shugak (A Fine and Bitter Snow, 2002, etc.) gets handed a cold one: Len Dreyer's body, frozen beneath a glacier, with a shotgun hole in its chest. Teenagers find the corpse while on a spring field trip to Grant Glacier. Since nobody remembers seeing the ubiquitous handyman since October, and State Trooper Jim Chopin is overwhelmed with hotter cases, he asks Kate to investigate but soon regrets getting her involved. After she begins inquiries, someone burns down the cabin her father built by hand and narrowly misses incinerating her and her ward, 14-year-old Johnny Morgan. To keep her safe, Jim fires her. Kate, bound on revenge, ignores him. Chopin then gets more help he doesn't want: Dandy Mike, the tribal chief's son, wants to be Jim's deputy, so he makes the rounds of ex-girlfriends, asking nosy questions about Dreyer. Between them, Kate and Dandy discover only that Len was an excellent handyman on a cash-only basis who occasionally allowed lustful women to wrestle him to the ground but showed little interest on his own. In Alaska, such frigidity amounts to suspicious behavior-until Kate discovers a more compelling reason for putting him in the deep freeze. This time, however, she's hot on the trail of a red herring while the real shark silently pursues her. A satisfying case for Kate and her friends, although alert readers will spot the villain before they do.

Kirkus Reviews

"One of the strongest voices in crime fiction." -Seattle Times

"Stabenow is a fine storyteller, but it is her passion for the Alaskan landscape and the iconoclastic people who inhabit it that fires this series and lifts this latest entry to its pinnacle." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Every time I think Dana Stabenow has gotten as good as she can get, she comes up with something better." —The Washington Times

"The skillful Ms. Stabenow has created a believable, well-defined character in Kate and placed her in a setting so beautiful that the crimes she investigates seem almost sacrilegious...this is Ms. Stabenow's 13th Kate Shugak novel, and they just get better and better."—Dallas Morning News

"A gifted few are able to employ the setting as something more, an ingredient that adds texture and tone and lifts the story out of the commonplace and into the rare...to these, add Dana Stabenow...this is the 13th volume in the Kate Shugak series, which, unlike many, keeps improving with age-due in large measure to Stabenow's splendid evocation of the Alaskan landscape."—San Diego Union-Tribune

"The characters literally come alive to bring you into this fast-paced thriller, which will keep you turning the pages of this high-voltage mystery."—Rendezvous

From the Publisher