Category Archives: Stan Jones

Books of the Month – August 2011

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August wasn’t a good month for my reading, at least numerically. I only finished 8 books for the month and I normally make it well into double digits :( Generally reading is my ‘go-to’ form of relaxation but for the last several weeks I have not been able to settle to much reading at all. Life and its ups and downs has gotten in the way a little more than usual but I can’t really put my finger on why I have been so easily distracted away from reading. I expect things will pick up soon. If not I’ll give myself a good, stern talking to.

I do have a great book of the month to recommend though. I read Stan Jones‘ White Sky, Black Ice for the global reading challenge and it was a thorough treat. Set in a small Alaskan town the book features an investigation into two deaths that locals first attribute to suicide. I was a little worried that the book might be a bit ‘worthy’ in the way it tackled the delicate matter of the issues facing Alaska’s indigenous population but I found it refreshingly honest and intelligent. A jolly good mystery and a warmth to the characters rounded out the experience nicely. 4.5 stars.

Other recommended reads from the month’s haul are:

Burned by Thomas Enger: A Norwegiean journalist returns to work after 2 years absence due to some traumatic personal experiences and is immediately thrust into reporting on a high-profile case in which a young student has been brutally murdered. The debut novel had its problems, most notably with increasingly outlandish plotting, but the author shows promise and there was a real credibility about the depiction of journalism and the disparity between what we (the public) say we want from our media and what our behaviour shows that we will actually read. 3 stars.

Rip Off by Kel Robertson: An Australian book where someone is killing participants in various dodgy financial schemes that have ripped off mum and dad investors and Inspector Brad Chen of the Australian Federal Police has to solve the crime while battling jurisdictional tantrums and a general public who think the murderer should be given a medal (not stopped). It’s funny, cleverly written and delightfully playful with the genre’s conventions. 4 stars.

The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin: This is a wonderful piece of Australian historical crime fiction set just after the end of WW2. Charlie Berlin is a returned soldier still coming to grips with his war time experiences as he rejoins the police in Melbourne and is then sent to investigate a series of robberies in rural Victoria. The book’s atmosphere is absorbing and feels very authentic, the characters are insightful and the mystery well-crafted. I gave the book 4 stars and the Ned Kelly Awards judges went even further, awarding it Best Crime Fiction Book for 2011 in a ceremony held last night as part of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.

The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg: To Sweden this time for a story surrounding the death of an 8 year old girl. I coined the phrase ‘the crime fiction you have when you’re not having crime fiction’ for this book (and its series) because there’s always a fair amount of other stuff going on. Here there are new parents dealing with post natal depression, various people uncovering secrets from their pasts and an abusive relationship simmering away in the background. The fictional Fjällbacka police aren’t the most competent force you’ll find either. But the book is well written and these emotional dramas are engaging because Lackberg makes readers care about the people she carefully introduces us to. 3.5 stars.

Written in Bone by Simon Beckett: the fact there is no link to a full review is no reflection on the book’s quality (merely of my level of distractedness lately). It tells the story of forensic anthropologist David Hunter who is called to the remote Hebridean island of Runa (Scotland) to assess whether or not a body that has been discovered was subject to death by natural causes or something more sinister. Nasty weather keeps David on the island and he becomes embroiled in the small community’s many secrets in this very atmospheric book. My eyes did start to boggle at the dead body pile-up but Beckett gets away with it due to superior writing and plotting skills. The narrator of the audio book, David Thorpe, was outstanding. 3.5 stars

Interestingly (?) all but one of these (Lackberg) are new to me authors. I love finding new authors to love.

The other two books I finished to round out the month were Nicci French’s Blue Monday and Lars Keplar’s The Hypnotist but for me these were meh reads so I’m going to waste no more bytes talking about them.

Other happenings at the blog

I shared my observations on cloud-based reading, having bought a cloud book via the booki.sh service last month. There were pros and cons and overall I decided I would try this type of reading again given the right circumstances. A week or so after I wrote the post Amazon announced its new cloud-based web app for Apple devices (iPhone, iPad) which will allow them to neatly skirt around Apple’s demand for 30% of all sales made via the Apple app store. I’ll try this app next time I’m reading a kindle book on my iPad just to compare the services (and because choice is a good thing innit?)

I wrote the first of what is supposed to be ten posts to celebrate women crime writers as it is the 25th anniversary of the US Sisters in Crime organisation this year. The challenge is being hosted here and if you aren’t going to participate you should at least follow the excellent wrap-ups from challenge master Barbara Fister as there are many wonderful books and writers being discussed. I talked about the female PI novel in my first post because they provided my introduction into crime writing by women (well as an adult anyway).

I’m not feeling very creative just now so no chart this month. Normal charty goodness will resume next month. Fingers crossed

Hopefully today’s delightful start to spring here in Australia (it was a gorgeous day AND I won a bottle of delicious cabernet from my local bookstore) will mean the reading gods smile upon me once more and I can get back to being lost in other worlds instead of staring distractedly around this one.

What about you…was August a good reading month? Did you have a favourite book? Or did you acquire anything you’re itching to read? 

Review: White Sky, Black Ice by Stan Jones

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In the first novel of what is, to date, a series of four books, State Trooper Nathan Active has been assigned to the (fictional) small town of Chukchi, in north-western Alaska. Although he was born in the town and is an Inupiat (Eskimo) himself he was raised in Anchorage by his white adoptive parents and as the book opens Active is counting the days until he can leave the small town again and head back to the comforts of the big city. He can only speak a few words of his native language, doesn’t hunt or engage in any of the other activities the Inupiat people traditionally love and is a bit sick of having all the single women in the vicinity foisted upon him. However when a young man is found dead and everyone else assumes it is just another in the long line of suicides of indigenous men Active is the one who thinks there might be something more sinister afoot. He observes a few discrepancies about the crime scene and starts looking into the man’s recent history, particularly his employment at the local copper mine. Even when a second death occurs Active has to fight his own organisation’s hierarchy and the entrenched beliefs of some of the indigenous people about their own futures to ensure a proper investigation is undertaken.

Given my only ‘knowledge’ of Alaskan culture comes from a love of early 90’s TV show Northern Exposure I can’t claim to know if this book has depicted its setting realistically but it certainly has a very credible feel to it.  The physical setting, including the beauty, isolation and potential danger of the location, all feel very authentic to me. And I can at least attest to the fact that the way cultural issues, particularly the tensions and complex relationships between the traditional Inupiat culture and that of the white man, ring true as they are similar to issues evident in contemporary Australia. One of the toughest issues explored in the damage inflicted by alcohol to the Inupiat people; it is partially blamed for the high number of suicides and generates such strong arguments for and against that there is a campaign to have the town become an alcohol free (or dry) town. What I really loved about the book was that it explored this and other cultural issues with sensitivity and intelligence without succumbing to the temptation for overt sentimentality or simplistic explanations for the state of affairs. Once again fiction proves far more adept at examining complex social issues than the bulk of what passes for media commentary these days.

As a balance to these issues there is also a lot of humour and warmth in the novel, some of which comes from Active’s status as not quite considered white or Inupiat. The locals like nothing more than to poke fun at Nathan for not knowing about some aspect of their beliefs or practices that he would have been well aware of if he’d grown up in the town but they’re not cruel about it. There’s also a lot of gentle humour in some of the depictions of the minor characters in the town, like the elderly bingo player who throws her grand daughter at Nathan (almost literally) because she thinks he needs a woman. She likes to be driven to bingo in Nathan’s trooper car with the lights flashing.

To top it all off there’s a cracker of a crime story here which doesn’t tread a predictable path at all. Nathan is quite a young man to be responsible for such a major investigation but Jones does a good job of contextualising this. And in many ways Active’s youth offers a refreshing perspective. He makes mistakes because he’s relatively inexperienced but he’s also tenacious and proves himself the kind of crime solver I will be happy to re-visit in future novels. The resolution to the mystery element of the book is both satisfying and in keeping with the rest of the novel which is an increasingly rare thing in this era of Hollywood-style endings.

White Sky, Black Ice wraps many of the things I really love about crime fiction into a tidy 201 pages. There’s a terrific sense of place and people, a thoughtful exploration of complicated issues which don’t always have an answer let alone an easy one, and a solidly entertaining whodunnit. What more could a reader want?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Stan Jones has lived in Alaska on and off for most of his life and has participated in many of the activities depicted in the novel (such as being what we’d call a bush pilot here in Oz). As an investigative journalist he won awards for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. He modelled his fictional town of Chukchi on the town of Kotzebue where he lived for many years.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.sjbooks.com/index.html
Publisher Soho [1999]
ISBN 1569473334
Length 201 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #1 in Nathan Active series
Source I bought it