A Grave Denied by Dana Stabenow

Another great title lifted from Theodore Roethke - and again the reference to the story was a bit too vague for me. Maybe I'll just have to read Roethke. She does do a very nice line in literary references - or in references to literature, generally stuff I'm extremely partial to. In this one we had Johnny reading Between Planets at one point and A Civil Contract at another. And he picked up Have Spacesuit, Will Travel along the way, too - one I like much better than Between Planets. We also have references to H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy books and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books. Kate's cabin is burned to the ground - and with it her library. She should invest in a Kindle - but I did check and the Travis McGee books are not available for Kindle - yet. Neither is much Bujold.

We get another regular killed in this one, not an important one, but one that was very much a feature of their little town of Niniltna. And, as usual, the killer nearly gets Kate, this time so nearly that Kate and Mutt are actually buried before Jim comes to the rescue.

The body count is pretty high in this one - seven - two current and five an old secret. Not to mention two attempts on Kate (she was supposed to have been in the cabin when it burned, with Johnny as collateral damage).

No real cliff-hanger this time, thank goodness. The Kate/Jim thing is left at an anomalous position, but what's new about that? The big news, romantically speaking, is that Johnny has a girl friend - and narratively, that Johnny and his friend discover both of the bodies around which the investigation is centered. We even have Johnny narrating portions of the story via his "journal" which he is keeping for his eighth grade teacher. His prose is rather uncharacteristically verbose and grammatically sound for a fourteen-year-old, but why quibble? Makes me wonder about his role in the future of this series.