The Kate Shugak Novels, Vol. 3 - Breakup • Killing Grounds • Hunter's Moon

Kate Shugak, former investigator for the Anchorage DA, returns in this omnibus edition containing books four through six of the award-winning series.

In A Cold-Blooded Business, Kate goes undercover at Royal Petroleum's North Slope facilities. They've been having some serious problems with the white stuff—not snow, but cocaine—and their highly-paid, isolated, somewhat stir-crazy employees have been overdosing at an alarming rate. Kate's job is to identify the dealer and staunch the flow before more people die. It's never that simple, of course.

In Play with Fire, Kate and friends stumble across a naked, decaying corpse in the woods. Judged death by misadventure by the Troopers, Kate's sense of justice demands that she launch her own investigation, leading her to ask some very uncomfortable questions of a frontier faith community. Questions that might drive someone to kill…again.

In Blood Will Tell, Kate is forced to involve herself in Native politics, attending the annual Federation convention in Anchorage and investigating the deaths of several board members. Opposition to a new development project seems to have been the link tying the victims together, but when Kate poses the question that all detective work begins with—cui bono?—she finds there are more suspects on the list than not.

Also included: the two Kate Shugak short stories, "Wreck Rights" and "Cherchez la Femme."

Kate Shugak used to investigate for the Anchorage DA's office—a job that brought her face-to-face with some of the very worst of humanity. You can only do that sort of work for so long without it getting to you, though… and then, once it does, once it really does, you have to put a lot of distance between you and it. Fortunately for Kate, if there's one thing Alaska has a lot of, it's distances.

So, she's moved back to The Park, to a homestead cabin that's off the grid and a lifetime away from the city…and yet, condo or cabin, Polo or parka, somehow people manage to be bad all over. And though always reluctant, Kate Shugak seems unable to remain uninvolved. She investigates.

Volume One contains the first three Kate Shugak novels—the Edgar-award winning A Cold Day for Murder, along with A Fatal Thaw, and Dead in the Water—as well as the short story prequel, "Nooses Give."

Newenham, Alaska is a bush town with a six-bed jail, a busted ATM and a saloon that does double-duty as a courtroom. It's a wide-enough patch to warrant a state police presence, though, and Trooper Liam Campbell is it, posted there by his superiors to spend some time in the wilderness. Campbell didn't expect the job to be simple, but finding his ex-lover crouched over a headless body on the tarmac is a hell of a way to get off the plane.

And it doesn't get any easier. From the (literally) cutthroat business of commercial fishing, to the paranoid misanthropy of the back-country prospector, to drug dealers, serial killers, and caches of forgotten war gold, Campbell will have his hands full. This omnibus edition contains all four of the Liam Campbell novels, Fire and Ice, So Sure of Death, Nothing Gold Can Stay, and Better to Rest, as well as the short stories "On the Evidence" and "Missing, Presumed…" Fans of the modern frontier, of mystery tinged with a frisson of romance, of slow-talking lawmen with good intentions, of tai chi and small aircraft piloting take note: Liam Campbell is for you.

A lifelong Alaskan, Dana Stabenow is an Edgar-award winning writer, best known for her Kate Shugak series of mysteries.

Two crewmen of the crab vessel Avilda are missing—presumed dead—under very suspicious circumstances. The Bering Sea offers ample means and opportunity, but without bodies, a motive, or evidence of foul play, the DA doesn’t have a case. And so, freelance investigator Kate Shugak finds herself working undercover in one of Alaska’s most dangerous professions: crab fisherman. The assignment will take her from the debauchery of Dutch Harbor to the most isolated of the Aleutians, and if the job itself doesn’t kill her, her  crewmates just might.

Third in Stabenow’s Edgar Award-winning series of Alaskan mysteries, Dead in the Water is richly informed by the author’s own upbringing aboard an Alaskan fishing vessel.