When the bodies of two young Alaska Native women are discovered along the banks of Ship Creek, and their deaths are ruled “accidental” and “undetermined” by police, burned out gumshoe Lewis Bocarde, well-acquainted with life on the gritty streets of Anchorage, senses something sinister rising. Allied with a suicidal social worker named Grace and a street-savvy group of indigenous contrarians, … Bocarde races to discover what flocks of ravens already know.
And to thaw the frantic screams frozen in the snow.
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I must say, I am extremely torn on how to rate this book, even though I did manage to do it. (plot – 5 stars, editing 2.5 stars and I rounded up to 4)The plot of the story is great, but the editing leaves much to be desired. (OK, I admit to being a bit of a grammar Nazi, but still.) Mr. English has obviously never met a run-on sentence that he didn’t think couldn’t be improved by adding an additional 20-25 words!! There were places where the entire paragraph was one sentence. At times I felt like saying, “Would you take a breath already!” And other times, there was so much going on in that sentence (a LONG list of things one of the characters was doing or saying) that by the time I got to the end of it, I’d lost the train of thought. I had to go back several times and start over to try and keep up with what was going on. There were missing words, wrong words, repeated words, etc that even a basic editing read-through would have caught. Also, it felt like Mr. English had a specific word count in mind and he was going to make that word count regardless. The book probably could have been much tighter with a bit of “trimming”. Then there was the tense thing. I would be reading along and suddenly it would change from past tense to present tense, sometime within the same paragraph. That drives me nuts. Pick a tense and stick with it. I’m fine with either past or present, but not both!
Ok, that’s what I didn’t like. Now let’s get to what I did like. This is one more first-rate thriller. The bad guy is written so well I wanted to go out and strangle him with my bare hands. He definitely epitomizes the bad guy you love to hate. He has not one redeeming trait. He’s that well-written. The protagonists are just as well-written. They are both broken, flawed people looking for a way to make the world a better place and will not give up until they do. There is plenty of action, for the most part, even though there are some slow sections. The last third of the book was really tense and I couldn’t put it down until I finished.
In spite of the things about this book that irritated me, I’m really glad I read it and would definitely be willing to try another book of Mr. English’s. All in all, a positive experience.
I obtained an ARC from BookSirens and want to thank them and the author for giving me the opportunity to read it. This is my honest and personal opinion.
Wicked tale. A mystery set in Anchorage, Alaska in the late 1900s. You get all the grit and grime of a city on the edge of the wilderness. It has one foot in civilization the other in primal world around it. The author either spent enough time here to get to know the place well or took copious notes in a very short time. I’m guessing the former. The situation with the native community, drunks on Fourth Ave., it’s all there. Great read.