I promised myself that I wouldn't read another murder mystery until I finished the paper for the class I'm taking. So much for that. These are just so much more fun to read than pompous, pretentious, paternalistic tomes on the future of American education after WWII. The paper is due in five days - this has got to be it.
Kate takes some significant steps in this one. She lets her grandmother shanghai her into taking center stage at an Alaskan Native Federation meeting, a fate she has been devoting herself to avoiding for the entire series so far. With a little undercover work, she has thwarted Jack's ex's plans to get full custody of their son (apparently purely out of spite, since she quite obviously doesn't care about the kid). This, of course, puts a major kink in the Kate/Jack relationship. She also exposed the plot behind the murders - to take over a large chunk of Alaskan tribal land for development. Finally, Ekaterina Moonin Shugak, Kate's grandmother, dies and leaves Kate her inheritor in the matter of the care of the tribe.
The Aleut traditional storytelling is the unifying theme here. It was first introduced three books back in the crab fishing book. Here it opens the book and Kate falls into the pattern as she is forced to address the AFN convention, and as she tries to give Jack's son Johnny a sense of his place in the world. It closes with it as emaa, her grandmother, joins the storytellers of legend.
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