MYSTERY/FICTION

Stan Jones

TUNDRA KILL

When Helen Mercer, Alaska’s ambtious and charismatic governor, flies into the Eskimo village of Chukchi and drafts police chief Nathan Active as her bodyguard, she promptly becomes the number one suspect in a murder by snowmobile.

Desperate to save her political career, she tries to seduce Active to throw him off the trail. When that doesn’t work, she claims he tried to rape her. Then she reopens an old murder case against Active’s beloved Grace Palmer. All of it, the governor hints, will go away if Active drops his investigation.

A native of Chukchi, but adopted and raised by a white couple in Anchorage, Active is regarded as almost white by the Inupiat Eskimo residents of the village. Even after several years in town, he doesn’t feel entirely at home in this isolated northern outpost.

But now Chukchi holds all that’s dear to him, and it’s all at stake. Active must win his battle of nerves with Helen Mercer or be fired, if not jailed himself, and see his loved ones destroyed.