So Sure of Death by Dana Stabenow

Three in a row. It is definitely time to read something else (like a couple of textbooks that happen to be lying on my desk). These definitely lack a measure of the focus and character of the Shugak series. It is tempting to say that she really ought to stick to female leads, because it almost seems in this one that the female supporting cast is better rounded and more convincing than her hero. Maybe it was this book and the fact that a man in his middle to late thirties is fully engaged in a pissing contest with his father.

Frost is filling the role of iconic poet for this series. He is certainly better known that Theodore Roethke, the muse of the Shugak books. Stabenow seems to be trying harder to incorporate the poetic themes in the story here with fairly direct references to the poems, but they still don't seem to address the content of the story particularly.

There are three separate and unrelated crimes in this one. While that is probably more realistic than having everything come together neatly in one package at the end, it is far more difficult to manage in the fictional setting. It has been done, Dell Shannon comes to mind, but those are very decidedly police procedurals, big city police procedurals. It almost seemed that Stabenow simply didn't want to develop any one of the stories completely so she just piled several underdeveloped stories on top of each other. None of the mysteries in this book are "honest mysteries" - there is simply not enough information given on any of them. For all three, the mass murder on the boat, the killing at the dig site, and the appearance of Campbell's father at the local AF base, the answers are presented like gift-wrapped packages in the last chapter.

There is even more than her usual "beating up on the hero" - even his sweetie and her bff and the new (female) trooper assigned to the station come in for multiple beatings up and shootings. There is also quite a lot of getting naked which doesn't do much to advance the plot. By the way, his wife died without regaining consciousness.

I probably wouldn't have all these complaints about these stories if someone I had never heard of before had written them. They are just disappointing when compared to Stabenow's other series. And if you want to know what I thought of her SF series, you can go back and find my comments on the first one. Note: I have not bothered to read the second, although my sister tells me I should.