A Fine and Bitter Snow by Dana Stabenow

Stabenow does have a fine way with titles. It isn't always entirely clear to me how the title connects to the story, but they are excellent titles. In the previous one The Singing of the Dead, the allusion is (I think) to the lives and deaths of four generations earlier and how those events warped the current generation. In this one, I'm not sure what the connection is. The line is from a poem by Theodore Roethke, but the connections to the people and events of this story are not obvious to me. Great title, though. Of course, inarguably, it does snow a lot in Alaska.

The opening crisis is the news that the good guy chief ranger of the Park, Dan O'Brian, has been asked to take early retirement to clear the way for someone more sympathetic to the Bush administration. That implies, someone less interested in conservation and stability of wildlife populations and more sympathetic to oil drilling, mining, logging, and development. Kate is canvassing everyone in the park with high powered contacts to make a few calls, and one of her visits is to a pair of elderly ladies who were WASPs during WWII and after the war discovered that Alaska was a place where they could continue to fly. They are the first victims, and the life of one of them holds the threads of the mystery.

Green issues and Native Alaskan issues seem actually central to the story and the mystery plays out against them, sometimes seeming primarily a vehicle to get the right people in the right place.

The right people frequently being Kate and Jim Chopin. Jim's job has also been threatened by the machinations of the then current administration. As they explore ways to bring industry and development to the park and take money out, it is decided that it would be a good thing to preemptively provide more law enforcement to the area and one proposed move is to divide the enormous area that Jim Chopin covers into two regions. This would be a major hit on his career, and, besides, as it says in the song "you gotta know the territory," and he does - and the people. So he is also contacting those who know people to find a way to avoid that.

Kate continues prickly and antagonistic, Jim is now cautiously pursuing. There are signs of a thaw by the time they have successfully concluded this investigation. Jim saves her life again, again with Mutt's assistance - or insistence, depending on how you look at it. And to all good dogs (or wolves) comes their eventual reward - this time she does get to eat the bad - well, sort of, partly.

And Johnny is resolving his ambivalent feelings toward Kate - he ran away from Arizona to find her in Alaska, but he has still blamed her for Jack's death. Kate's own sense of guilt has been an issue, also, but they both seem to be getting over it - together.