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ISBN 0-525-94438-9
Broken in rank and transferred in disgrace, Alaska state trooper Liam Campbell arrives at his new posting in Newenham on Bristol Bay to find lost love and bush pilot Wyanet Chouinard crouched over the body of Bob DeCreft, who may or may not have been murdered with the propeller of her Piper Super Cub.
Author’s Note: Check out the tail numbers on the plane on the cover of the book. They’re the tail numbers for my Dad’s Cub.
About the Dedication
For my aunt
Patricia Perry Carlson
Liam looks a little like Mel Gibson
just for her
My Auntie Pat has been a huge Mel Gibson fan since the movie “Attack Force Z.” She just loves the way he walks.
Audio Excerpt
Hear an audio excerpt from this book at Odeo.com.
Book Excerpt
Liam got on first and watched the rest of the passengers board. It was a full load, a disparate group that he had in typical trooper fashion typed and cross-matched with their potential for future crime while waiting for the flight to be called. There was the Alaskan Old Fart, short, dark, a grin one part mean to two parts pure evil, who had poacher written all over him. There was the tall man with the shock of white hair and his green-eyed daughter, who would both of them have helped the Old Fart skin out whatever he took whenever he took it, but only so much as they could use in a winter. There was the Moccasin Man, tall, loping, clad in fatigues and beaded buckskin moccasins with matching belt pouch that Liam instantly pegged for growing wholesale quantities of marijuana in his back bedroom, and the Hell’s Angel, Moccasin Man’s sidekick, barrel-shaped beer belly, black leather boots with a shine on them to match the one reflected by his shaven, bullet-shaped scalp. Meth lab in his spare room, Liam figured. The Flirt, on the other hand, should have been arrested for incitement to riot the second after she’d stepped out in public that morning: she wore a red silk shirt with no bra beneath it and a long skirt that did accentuated the deliberate sway of her very nice ass. Moccasin Man had demonstrated an immediate and obvious admiration for that sway, and had been granted the privilege of escorting the Flirt to her seat.
The rest of the manifest wasn’t as interesting. There was the Bush couple, a nondescript husband and wife who looked like card-carrying members of the proletariat who took their seats and melted into the bulkhead. They were followed by a family of five, white father, Yupik mother and three small children, one still nursing, a tall, spare, grizzled man who had looked long and hard at Liam and who had almost spoken to him in the terminal but then appeared to think better of it, a plump woman who just missed being grandmotherly by two streaks of ice blue eye shadow and a slash of maroon lipstick, and the airline’s station manager for King Salmon, who curled up in the front right hand seat and promptly went to sleep, snoring loudly enough to be heard over the engines.
Liam envied him deeply. He himself was occupied with holding the fourteen-seat Fairchild Metroliner up in the air by the edge of his seat as they rose smoothly over Knik Arm and banked south down Cook Inlet. It was half past three o’clock on the afternoon of May 1. Breakup was late, temperatures still dropping to or below freezing at nights, stubborn ice ruts refusing to melt from the roads, snow clinging obstinately to the Chugach Mountains. It wasn’t the only reason Liam was glad to be leaving Anchorage behind, but it would do, and it was almost enough for him to forget that he was ten thousand feet up in the air.
Almost.