Excerpt:

“Bet your ass. So all these Park rats get up and swear on their ancestors how the Park is their home and how improving the railroad grade into a real highway is going to ruin the quality of life for everyone and how the Alaska Railroad kills all those moose every winter and what makes this committee think a new road wouldn’t be a danger to caribou migration, and so on and so on and so on. You get the general idea. Then Miller gets up, this intense little fucker from Outside, and contradicts everything that had been said before and actually has the gall to produce facts and figures, goddam statistics, can you imagine, to back up his theories. Yes, indeedy, he told us all how to run this here Park, like we’d never heard the words ‘game management’ put together in a sentence before.”

Kate gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Mandy, the only game management you’ve ever been involved in is not getting caught when you run out of dog food and go caribou hunting in April. Between you and Abel I’m surprised there’s anything left on four feet inside the Park.“

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Fun fact: This book was written purely as an exercise between A Handful of Stars and Red Planet Run, the second and third Star Svensdotter novels, mostly to give myself a rest from all the research writing science fiction entails. After I sold Second Star my editor asked “What else have you got?”

Well, there was this big file on my laptop called “Mystery”…

Chatter Kate Shugak a cold day for murder Kate Shugak