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    Bad Blood
    Bad Blood
    Bad Blood
    Ebook300 pages6 hours

    Bad Blood

    By Dana Stabenow

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    KATE SHUGAK is a native Aleut working as a private investigator in Alaska. She's 5 foot 1 inch tall, carries a scar that runs from ear to ear across her throat and owns half-wolf, half-husky dog named Mutt. Resourceful, strong-willed, defiant, Kate is tougher than your average heroine – and she needs to be to survive the worst the Alaskan wilds can throw at her.

    BAD BLOOD: One hundred years of bad blood between two Alaskan villages come to a boil when the body of a young Kushtaka man is found wedged in a fish wheel. Sergeant Jim Chopin's prime suspect is a Kuskulana man who is already in trouble in both villages for falling in love across the river. But when he disappears, both tribes refuse to speak to Jim – so when there's a second murder which looks suspiciously like payback, Jim calls on Kate Shugak for help.

    Now Kate must untangle the village tales of tragedy and revenge if she is to find the truth before it's too late...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateFeb 26, 2013
    ISBN9781781852897
    Bad Blood
    Author

    Dana Stabenow

    Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised on a 75-foot fishing tender. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first book in the bestselling Kate Shugak series, A Cold Day for Murder, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Follow Dana at stabenow.com

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    Reviews for Bad Blood

    3.5/5

    78 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Romeo and Juliet--Alaska style. Chopper Jim is stonewalled when he tries to solve murders invovling two feuding villages and no one will talk. The narration: Marguerite Gavin does a fantastic job reading this series. Given the ending, I thought that this book, #20, was the end of Kate. Imagine my surprise to find #21 available.
    • 1/5
      Couldn't seem to get going with this book at all and quickly abandoned it.
    • 4/5
      Another satisfying read from Stabenow. This book ends with a cliffhanger. The Shugak series, of which this is book 20,are full of information about Aleutian Indian culture and Alaskan plants and animals. If you read Hillerman or Nevada Barr,you will like this series.There is a lot going on in this murder mystery--3 murders, drugs and whiskey smuggling, and a blood feud between two bush Alaskan villages. There is also a Romeo and Juliet love story.This book is more about Alaska State trooper Jim Chopin than Kate Shugak.
    • 4/5
      Romeo and Juliet crossed with the Hatfields and McCoys and plopped down in modern-day Alaska. The haves and the have-nots: two small towns on the fringes of one of America's last frontiers, on opposite sides of a river, with opposing viewpoints on almost everything and bone-deep, years-long grudges held fiercely by almost all concerned. The resentment and hatred flicker but ride the edge of civility, until the first body turns up and Sergent Jim Chopin, the new flying pastor, and of course, Kate Shugak and Mutt get involved.I liked everything about this book with one huge exception: the ending. Not nice at all to leave us readers with a fade-to-black that way!
    • 2/5
      Like a previous reviewer, I agree that the series is just losing my interest. Absolutely hated the ending, but I guess something had to be interesting in the book.
    • 3/5
      Just finished listening to Bad Blood(Kate Shugak #20) and here's the verdict:What I liked: The narration: Marguerite Gavin does a fantastic job reading this series. Her voices fit the characters and she has a reading style that keeps you engaged.The romance between Jennifer and Ryan. Although they are young they seem to be mature and have a realistic picture of what it takes to make a marriage work.The ending: I know many readers were disappointed with the ending but it left me anxious for the next volume. The ending was so shocking it left you wondering what's next for the series.What I didn't like: The convoluted plot line. Not only was it confusing it was boring. The reason behind the murders was underwhelming. I would like to see more suspense and a mystery that keeps you guessing.The character's were flat-Jim and Kate seemed to be shadows of their former selves. Also, Johnny only made a brief phone in appearance in the book.I have to admit if not for the ending I may have given up on the series as it seems to have lost a bit of its sparkle. I'm hoping the next installment will give the Kate Shugak books a much needed kick start. Not bad but not Dana Stabenow's best. 3.0 stars
    • 4/5
      Chopper Jim is stonewalled when he tries to solve murders invovling two feuding villages and no one will talk. Violence and hatred are in the air, juxtaposed with the romance between two young folks from each village. There is crime resolution by the end, but unsettling results for Kate.
    • 2/5
      First I need to say I thought it was me. Next I need to say it was the book. I picked up another right after this one by another author and I ended up staying up to read the whole thing. It was well written, interesting, great plot, characters that lived. In short everything this was not. It was the book.

      Like the last book of Stabenow's, I had a very hard time getting into this. The last book, as much as I love Kate and Liam, was like wrestling with a grizzly during breakup. Dana Stabenow is on my buy without reading list. I am probably going to remove it from the list after the last two books.

      I would have given this a 3 [barely more like a rounded up 2.85] except Dana is now doing the draw it out for more than one book cliff hanger endings. I hate those. The ending was a 1. Flat out if you don't plan to read the next book, don't bother. It was a serious temptation to make the entire book a 1 but I've read worse. They need a rating that says "Should never have been a book" instead of 1

      I don't expect a plot to be tidy but I do expect it to not make me have to buy the next book because some twit of a writer can't finish it up properly in one book. I call those twits the "I can't write but I can draw one book out and make a LOT of money from it" writers. They take one plot, meander around, don't bother to end it but leave you hanging and continue the plot in the next. By the time you finish all 7 books in their series [if you last that long] You suddenly realize you read half a book.

      Dana's previous books were solid, well written, funny, serious, and, while in a series, could be read as a stand alone. Now? She's one of the masses that are not on my buy before reading list.

      It, like the last, jumped all over the place and seemed as if I were reading a couple short stories that were interwoven. The actually plot seems to start halfway thru the book. The beginning was simply set up and boring set up at that. It didn't add anything to any of the characters and I couldn't see the Kate, Jim or Mutt I fell in love with.

      If she hadn't been better at writing before this, she would have got a 3 but she's better than this.
    • 4/5
      Two small towns, one big feud, a pair of star-crossed lovers, and several murders.If you've been reading the series, you'll want this. If you haven't, start earlier. (Although it would stand alone reasonably well, I think.)

    Book preview

    Bad Blood - Dana Stabenow

    Prologue

    1

    Two villages, where two rivers meet.

    A geologic age before the runoff from Alaskan Glacier high up in the Quilak Mountains chewed through a granite ridge to form a narrow canyon fifteen miles long.

    A millennium before, a massive earthquake exacerbated a fault in the ridge. Half of it cracked and slid off to the southwest. It left behind a V shaped wedge between the confluence of two watercourses, which would one day be named Gruening River on the south side and Cataract Creek on the north.

    The tip of the vee pointed due west. The surface of the wedge was flat and topped with a thick slice of verdant soil raised a hundred feet in the air by the earthquake. That earthquake had also fractured a way to the surface through the granite uplift for an underground spring. The spring’s outflow trickled down the south face of the wedge, over time carving a channel for a little stream too steep to support a salmon run and too shallow to be good for anything but watering the blueberry bushes that grew thickly along its sides. In spring, this slope was first to thaw, snow and ice giving way to a fairyland of wildflowers, the brash orange and yellow florets of western columbine, the shy blue of forget-me-nots, the noxious brown blooms of chocolate lilies, the elegant pink paintbrush, and the dignified purple monkshood.

    By luck of the geologic draw, the land across the river remained largely undisturbed by the earthquake, remaining a flat marsh covered in thick grass, cattails, and Alaska cotton. Over time glacial silt carried downriver filled in the marsh, and alder, diamond willow, and cottonwood grew out to the water’s edge. The force and flow of the combined currents of river and stream undercut the banks to provide habitat for river otters, mink, and marten, and carved tiny tributaries to be dammed by beavers and colonized by salmon.

    Two hundred winters before, the Mack family walked up the frozen river. It was a wide river, not too deep, with a good gravel bottom. When it thawed that spring, even on a cloudy day an endless silver horde was visible through the peaty water, a solidly packed, seemingly inexhaustible mixture of king and red and silver salmon moving inexorably upstream. Tobold Mack, the little clan’s patriarch, had led them south from the Interior, where a wasting disease had affected the moose population. A decade of famine had led to inter-tribal competition among the local Athabascans over the remaining food sources, and to a disastrous decline in population of man and beast alike.

    That summer, Tobold looked long on where the white water rushed to join the brown, at the arrows in both left by the dorsal fins of the struggling salmon, the birch stumps left by the beavers and the willow stands gnawed down by the moose. He looked up at the mountains that cut into the eastern horizon, beautiful and terrible, and yet comforting all the same in their solid impenetrability. With mountains like those at his back, a man felt safe.

    We have walked far enough, he said.

    They built a weir and a snug dugout on the south shore of the river. Drying racks were next, for fish in summer and moose meat in winter, and caribou when the Quilak herds came down to the river to calve in spring. Babies were born and lived, and elders survived long enough to contribute their accumulated wisdom to the tribe, and for everyone in between there was enough food easily available that there was time to sing and dance and play and laugh. Time to not only make a birchwood bowl for eating, and time to carve decorations around its edge. Time not only to make a parka from beaver skins warm enough to withstand the worst winter could throw at them, and time to embroider the parka with trade beads and dentalium shells.

    This village they named Kushtaka.

    Seventy winters before the present day, Walter Estes and Percy Christianson came up the river, trappers looking for beaver. They were new to the country but not to Alaska, being Aleuts displaced from the island of Anua by the war the Japanese had brought to the great land. Walter and Percy had fought together in the islands and knew firsthand how little there was to go back to. Now they looked for a new place to call home.

    The Macks, like any Alaskans happy to see a new face in the long dark doldrums of winter, made them welcome. Estes was half Italian and Christianson was half Norwegian but they both comported themselves as men should, sharing the game and the fish they took in equal measure with their hosts. There was still more than enough for all, then.

    Five years later, Walter and Percy moved across the river and built their homes on top of the big wedge of rock rising in the vee between the creek and the river.

    The Macks approved. Ownership of any part of river and creek and its adjacent lands was not a concept the people of Kushtaka understood. They hunted the moose that browsed through the willow and the caribou that calved on the riverbanks, they trapped the beaver and the river otter and the muskrat, they gathered the crowberries and the blueberries that grew on the south-facing slope of the wedge, and they cut the wood of the spruce and birch and alder for fuel. They took enough, never too much, because there was always next season, and they knew from hard experience handed down from Tobold Mack himself that there was always the chance that the next season could be a bad one, with the long cold returning, scarce game, and too many mouths to feed. In this vast land, there was still plenty of room for all, and a good neighbor was always welcome in hard times.

    Percy sent for his bride, Balasha, who was half Russian, a plump, lively woman who settled down to smoke salmon, weave grass baskets in the fashion of the Aleuts, and pop out healthy children at the rate of one every two years. Walter married Nancy Mack, who joined him up on the wedge, in the log cabin he built for her.

    They called their village Kuskulana. It was not as conveniently placed as Kushtaka, being a hard slog uphill from the salmon-rich waters of river and creek, and a longer, harder slog uphill when burdened with the hindquarter of a moose. But the spring that bubbled up provided much better drinking water than the Kushtaka wells, which were brown and brackish, and its sharp point hid a good-sized plateau that widened to the east, a good site for an airstrip. Walter, inspired by the sight of the fighters and bombers who had filled the air over the skies of the Aleutians during the war, was determined to learn to fly and promptly hacked an airstrip out of the alders, tied a red flannel shirt on a pole at one end for a wind sock, and bought one of the first Piper Super Cubs.

    Twenty winters on, President Eisenhower signed Alaska’s statehood act, and among other things, the federal government began to build post offices in the Bush. Air taxies all over Alaska got federal mail contracts. Kuskulana and Kushtaka both applied for the post office, which went to Kuskulana because they had the airstrip, and Walter’s son, Walter, Jr., got the mail contract.

    And because the post office was in Kuskulana, a Christianson got the postmaster’s job, a rare prize in Bush Alaska, full-time federal employment with a steady paycheck and benefits.

    Twelve years after statehood, President Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in which Alaskan tribes gave the federal government a right-of-way across aboriginal lands from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, built to bring North Slope oil to market. In exchange, the tribes received forty-four million acres and almost a billion dollars.

    Some Alaska Natives claimed that, with the formation of tribes into corporations, their homes, their ways of life, their very cultures would be forfeit, requiring them to become white in an already too white world. But land and money, those two possessions by which white culture measured itself, were powerful inducements. As most tribes did after enduring three hundred years of forced secondary status, Kuskulana opted into the agreement.

    Kushtaka was one of the handful of Alaskan villages that did not.

    ANCSA money flowed into Kuskulana coffers, and the village blossomed out with new houses and the villagers with new skiffs and drifters and four-wheelers and snow machines.

    Kushtaka rechinked the steadily increasing gaps between the logs on their fifty- and hundred-year-old cabin walls, and made do with boats and Snogos inherited from their fathers.

    Kuskulana was given its pick of parcels of prime land in the area, and every Kuskulaner of any age from six months to sixty years became the proud owner of a five-acre lot, many of them on the Gruening River and several of which encroached on the land where Kushtaka’s fish wheel had stood for generations. Roger Christianson, Sr., even tried to lay claim to the fish wheel site itself. Said claim was quickly quashed, but the Kushtakans didn’t forget. It didn’t help matters when Kuskulana built their new boat landing almost directly across the river from the Kushtaka fish wheel. The wash from the Kuskulana skiffs muddied the water near the fish wheel and frightened the salmon.

    Dale and Mary Mack at Kushtaka opened a little store in their living room, stocking it with items they bought in bulk from Ahtna and Anchorage and selling them at a modest markup, dry and canned goods, cases of pop and potato chips, aspirin and Band-Aids.

    And then Roger Christianson and Silvio Aguilar opened a full-service store in its own building in Kuskulana, with everything the Macks’ store carried plus fresh fruit and vegetables and even fresh milk.

    The Macks’ store was out of business in three months. Dale Mack and Roger Christianson bumped into each other at Costco in Ahtna and had words that were witnessed by people from both villages, words that lost nothing in the retelling and only hardened the attitudes of everyone who heard it second- and thirdhand. You couldn’t trust a Kuskulaner not to steal your idea and cheat you out of your business, the Kushtakans said. Those Kushtakers, said the Kuskulaners, they hadn’t really made it into this century yet, you know? Probably wouldn’t ever, the rate they were going. They hadn’t even managed to muster the wherewithal to pay for a power line across the river, and there wasn’t a flush toilet in the entire village.

    Whereas every new house in Kuskulana had hot and cold running water.

    Teenagers of both villages, quick to pick up the elder vibe, began a series of hormone-driven confrontations at various potlatches. Outnumbered five to one, the Kushtakers took home the majority of the bruises, but so long as the hostilities were confined to the occasional tribal celebration held far away from either village, the adults were inclined to look the other way.

    Two years before, the world’s second-largest gold deposit was found sixty miles north-northeast of where the creek and the river met.

    Before the first backhoe was airlifted into the Suulutaq Mine, the population of Kuskulana climbed onto its many four-wheelers and beat down a serviceable trail between their village and the mine site. With ready access winter and summer, the trail made their people more attractive as employees to mine management. Given the working airstrip, Kuskulana became the designated alternative landing site in case Niniltna and Suulutaq were both socked in at the same time. Which made the Kuskulana strip eligible for federal funds for runway improvements, an electronic weather-reporting station, and the construction of a hangar.

    Kuskulana was, therefore, enthusiastically pro-mine, and their people came home to spend their paychecks.

    Kushtaka, on the wrong side of the river, sent fewer workers to the mine. Those who went seldom returned, preferring to resettle in Kuskulana and Niniltna and Ahtna and even Anchorage, where there was cable and Costco, and Beyoncé concerts only a 737 ride away. Kushtakans, fearing the drain on their population and resenting the ever-increasing wealth of their parvenu neighbors, came down hard against the mine, on the side of the fishermen and the environmentalists and the conservationists who were devoting their considerable resources to stop it.

    That September, Zeke Mack was out moose-hunting on the south side of the river. Inexplicably, he missed the bull with the four brow tines on both sides and instead put a hole through the trailing edge of the right wing of Joe Estes’s 172. Joe having just taken off from the south end of the Kuskulana airstrip and at that time 150 feet in the air.

    Joe got back down in one piece, but it soon became known in both communities where the shot had come from, and there was some subsequent conversation about just how bad Zeke’s eyesight was. A lot of laughter accompanied the conversation in Kushtaka. Laughter was conspicuous by its absence in Kuskulana, whose pilots started taking off to the north.

    The following May, the state announced that it was closing the Kushtaka school because enrollment had fallen below ten students, and that Kushtaka students henceforth would attend the Kuskulana school. Truth to tell, Kushtaka had been fudging the numbers for years. Roger Christianson, Jr., in Kuskulana and Uncle Pat Mack in Kushtaka—on the whole, sensible men—did think privately that perhaps some of the hostility between the two villages might abate once the kids started having to sit next to one another in class.

    That, of course, was before someone tried to set the Kuskulana Public School on fire with a five-gallon can of gasoline and a blowtorch.

    And last September, Far North Communications built a cell tower in Kuskulana. They dedicated one of the antennas on the tower to Kushtaka.

    Geography informs who we are.

    Kuskulana, flush with ANCSA, state, and federal dollars and land, a post office, an airstrip, a store, a school, a cell tower, on the same side of the river as a world-class industrial development and with a trail navigable by ATV and snow machine between the two, flourished.

    Kushtaka… did not.

    Act I

    2

    Tuesday, July 10

    Kushtaka

    Tyler Mack was an eighteen-year-old stick of postadolescent dynamite just waiting for the right match. He was smart in all the wrong ways, using his intelligence chiefly to conspire with Boris Balluta, his best friend and coconspirator since childhood, on ways and means to avoid manual labor.

    Of medium height, built mostly of muscle and bone, Tyler had thick dark hair that flopped into dark brown eyes that always seemed to be more focused on his next deal than on the person he was talking to. He was a shirttail relative of Auntie Edna in Niniltna, which made the entire Shugak clan part of his extended family in Byzantine ways known only to its elders. Auntie Edna considered him a member of her personal tribe and was quick to grab him up by the ear when word of his activities came her way. Tyler, as quick as he was lazy, took good care to keep his ears out of her reach.

    But this morning he hadn’t been quick enough, his uncle Pat having dumped him out of bed at sunup, which in mid-July was 2 a.m., and booted him into his clothes and on his way upriver without so much as a mug of coffee to get his heart started.

    It was a beautiful morning, clear and cool. Mist smoked up from the surface of the water, broken temporarily by the bow of the skiff moving upriver, closing in again behind its stern. Night, in summer only a suggestion of twilight between midnight and oh-dark-thirty, gave way to an intensifying rim of gold on that part of the horizon stretching from the northeast all the way around to the southwest. Uncle Pat’s outboard was so finely tuned and so diligently maintained that its muted purr was barely audible above the rush of water beneath the skiff’s hull. Eagles chittered from treetops. A moose cow and two leggy calves foraged for the tenderest shoots of willow on one bank. Around a bend, a grizzly bear sleeping peacefully on a gravel bar woke with a snort and glared around nearsightedly. He rolled to all four paws and gave himself a good shake, his thick golden pelt moving almost independently of the rich layer of fat beneath, and lumbered into the water to bat out a morning snack of red salmon.

    Tyler noticed none of this. He hated working the fish wheel almost as much as he hated getting up before the crack of noon. Working the fish wheel was way too wet and entailed way too much heavy lifting for a man clearly meant for a cushier life. Uncle Pat was well able to tend to the fish wheel himself, eleven hundred years old or not. Tyler had had plans for today, plans that involved Boris and a scheme that was going to make them both rich enough to escape the influence of old farts like Uncle Pat and Auntie Edna once and for all and set their feet on the path to riches and the high life. Park Strip condos in Anchorage, fitting themselves out in Armani at Nordstrom, parties at the Bush Company, weekends in Vegas. They’d be MVP Gold on Alaska Airlines before the year was out, and then everyone who’d ever shown Tyler Mack the back of their hand had better by god look out. Tyler was on his way to the big time, and no one and nothing was going to get in his way. He’d already proved that once, and he was ready to do it again, anyplace, anytime.

    He imagined Uncle Pat coming to him for a loan for a new kicker or a new shotgun, and smiled to himself. Of course he would give him the money. Of course he would. He only hoped the old man would stroke out trying to say thank you.

    Two miles above Kushtaka village, the river had carved a wide loop in the face of the landscape. Cottonwood grew in clumps on the curve, thick trunks covered with coarse bark looming thirty feet over the alder and diamond willow jostling for place below. The soft wood of the cottonwood tree made it prone to snap off in high winds. Cottonwood scrags formed bridges for the alder and willow to lean on and trail leafy fingers in the water beneath. Together they cast welcome shadows over the gravel shallows for weary salmon returning home to spawn.

    The Mack family had had a fish wheel just below that gravel bar since 1901, when a stampeder, one Joshua Malachi Smith, had struck out panning for gold and got lost on his way to Valdez for a boat home. Daniel Mack found him trying to catch salmon with his bare hands, and the Kushtakans took him in before he starved to death or died of exposure, whichever came first. In return, he taught them how to build a fish wheel, a series of buckets on a wheel caused by the current of the river to rotate on an axle. The buckets scooped up the fish on their way upriver and dumped them into a chute that led to a holding pen. When the salmon were running, the holding pen had to be emptied two and three times a day. During a good run, sometimes more.

    The first fish wheel was made of woven willow, which did not stand up well to a current made swift and strong by runoff from a winter’s worth of snow, and had to be rebuilt every spring. Today, the Mack fish wheel was made of stainless steel and mesh, held together with nuts and bolts. It was indestructible as well as portable, designed to be removed from the water at the end of each season and rebuilt at the edge of the river again every spring.

    A fat red jumped on Tyler’s left, falling back against the water with a rich, full smack! The sun peeped over the Quilaks just in time to turn the resulting flash of droplets into liquid diamonds, suspending them momentarily in midair before they fell back into the river, itself a moving, jeweled surface pregnant with mystery and treasure.

    None of which did Tyler take any notice of, and this in a year in which king salmon were scarce and cloudy, rainy days plentiful.

    What he did see as he nosed the skiff into the bank next to the fish wheel, was Jennifer Mack in a skiff on the other side of the river. The wrong side of the river, which is what you might expect from a girl, who had no business anywhere near a fish wheel anyway.

    He opened his mouth to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing—maybe he could blackmail her into working the wheel today while he was at it—when he caught sight of a second figure, a man standing in the alders at the foot of the set of stairs leading down to

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