 |
|
Welcome to the official web site of author Stan Jones! Frozen
Sun Reviews
 New York Times:No one shows you the ugly side of Alaska the way Stan Jones does in his somber novels about Nathan Active, an Eskimo state trooper posted back to Chukchi, his native village in the Arctic Circle. In FROZEN SUN, Nathan is sent to balmy Anchorage for computer training, giving him a chance to track down Grace Sikingik Palmer, a former “Miss North World” and onetime pride of the village, now rumored to be a homeless prostitute working Anchorage’s infamous Four Street district. After giving her up for dead, Nathan learns that his fallen angel may be working in a fish-processing plant in the Aleutian Islands. It’s a hellish place (“You not puke in here, you go in john,” the line foreman warns Nathan), and Jones makes no attempt to prettify it. Just as he doesn’t pretend to find anything remotely character-building in the conditions of those who have survived the unforgiving climate of the Arctic only to disappear on the streets.Kirkus Reviews:They call her Amazing Grace and, dead or alive,
Alaska state trooper Nathan Active has to find
her. Grace Palmer is a golden child. So smart and
so "beautiful from the day she was born," her
father tells state trooper Nathan Active. That's
why, he claims, he named her Grace. But the golden
child is gone, dropped out from the university in
Anchorage. Why? No one knows, and her parents have
stopped asking. Now, however, her dying mother
wants desperately to say goodbye. Could Nathan
please go to Anchorage to look for her? Our hero
is reluctant. For one thing, he's half convinced
she's dead. A more disconcerting reason is harder
to acknowledge, even to himself: He's been
bewitched by her picture. At any rate, in
Anchorage he discovers that Amazing Grace, as
she's known in Four Street's bad bars and
dangerous dives, has spiraled downward, her life a
dismal history of exploitative men, run-ins with
cops, violence and booze. Depressed and
discouraged, Nathan sees little hope that she has
survived this nonstop array of largely
self-inflicted wounds. But Grace is indeed
amazing. And unpredictable. And determined. And,
as Nathan learns the hard way, oh so tricky. That
rare thing, a deftly plotted mystery that's also
an irresistible love story. With it, Jones's
Alaska series (Shaman Pass, 2003, etc.) takes a
quantum leap forward. Library Journal:Nathan Active, an Alaskan trooper assigned to Chukchi, an Inupiat Eskimo village in the Arctic where he was born, is looking for the estranged daughter of the local high school principal because her mother is dying of liver cancer. When the principal is found shot to death, the girl is the only suspect. This third book in Jones's Alaskan series (White Sky, Black Ice; Shaman Pass) does not disappoint. The investigation turns Active's life upside down and reshuffles his beliefs. Readers of Dana Stabenow and Mike Doogan will appreciate Jones's take on Alaskan justice. Recommended for all collections. International
Noir Fiction
The Nathan Active series by Stan Jones follows the
career of a young Inupiaq State Trooper in Alaska,
who was raised by adoptive parents in Anchorage but
has been posted to the Bush town of Chukchi, where
his birth mother lives. If that scenario makes you
think "soap opera," you'd be mistaken. The clueless
outsider who is nevertheless native "Eskimo" is a
perfect vehicle for the investigation of the fault
lines between Alaska's various peoples, through the
lens of crime fiction. Nathan is a city boy with a
strained relationship with both his birth mother and
his adoptive family, trying to adapt to the Bush
while also trying to get posted back to the city.
The first two novels in the series, published
several years ago by SoHo Press, follow Nathan in
the Bush town and in the Alaskan wilderness. Frozen
Sun, the new book, published by Alaska's Bowhead
Press, follows the Trooper to Anchorage and an
island fishing camp, in pursuit of a young woman who
went missing years before. An astute reader will
spot some plot elements before the story gets to
them, but Nathan's emotionally damaged character,
his relationship to both natives and whites in
Chukchi, the evocation of life in the Bush, and his
tentative attempts at romance are all very
appealing. The language of the small town is also
very well evoked (in the same way as the Outback
language of a similar cultural fault line in Adrian
Hyland's Diamond Dove/Moonlight Downs)--for example,
Nathan and the other Inupiat townspeople rarely say
"yes" to anything, using "I guess" instead. The
flavor of the language is portrayed, without any
artificial dialect in the speech. And the Bush is
never idealized: in Frozen Sun, the descent of a
village woman into tawdry homelessness on the
streets of Anchorage is central to the story.
Nathan's approach to finding her is indirect an
conflicted at every point. He makes rookie mistakes
(consistent with some of his mistakes concerning
local customs in the earlier books) with both the
case and his girlfriend. Frozen Sun is, like the
first two Nathan Active stories, a subtle, vivid,
and effective crime novel that deserves a wide
readership: and I for one am looking forward to a
new addition to the series, Village of the Ghost
Bears, promised for 2009. --By Glenn Harper |