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Ghost Light Reviews
Nathan Active returns in
murder mystery that delivers a complex
investigation and plenty of twists
By David James,
Anchorage Daily News
If you need to escape from the
pandemic, there have been no reported cases of
COVID-19 in Chukchi, Alaska. Of course, Chukchi
is a fictional town, and people have an
unfortunate habit of getting murdered there, but
apart from that, it’s a decent place.
Chukchi, which is loosely based on Kotzebue, is
the setting for the Nathan Active mystery series
that Anchorage author and former Kotzebue
resident Stan Jones has been writing since the
late 1990s. The series follows the adventures of
Active, chief of the regional Public Safety
Department, who like any fictional sleuth worthy
of his own series is a magnet for mysterious
deaths.
“Ghost Light,” the seventh and latest
installment, is no exception. The story opens on
an otherwise uneventful day in late summer when
local elder Oscar Leokuk brings his wife,
Tommie, in to see Active. Tommie, who suffers
from dementia, has a habit of walking around
town on her own and bringing home the odd pieces
of detritus she finds along the way.
In this case, the detritus is part of a human
jawbone, with a single molar and a bit of tissue
still attached. Not long afterward, the couple
returns, this time with part of a rib. Active
sends it south to the state medical examiner,
who finds blade marks on it. Someone has been
murdered, there’s a body somewhere, and no one
in the small community has gone missing.
And so the story is off and running. As with the
previous book in the series, Jones has brought
fellow Alaska novelist and journalist Patricia
Watts onboard as coauthor in what proves to be
one of the shorter installments. Those looking
for a quick winter read won’t be disappointed by
the result.
The body is fairly quickly located in an
abandoned shelter in a camping area near town.
The victim is identified as Shalene Harvey, a
resident of Nome who worked in Prudhoe Bay. A
relative loner estranged from her mother, and
presumed by her employer to have quit her job
without notice, Shalene had dropped off the
radar in late spring without anyone thinking
foul play might be afoot.
Thus, of course, the job falls on the shoulders
of our hero to find the killer. And this being
detective fiction, Jones and Watts throw plenty
of suspects at readers, most of them coworkers
of Shalene’s. And readers will, naturally, play
along, thinking at periodic moments that they’ve
gotten ahead of Active and solved the case, only
to have new twists thrown at them by the
authors. But worry not. Nathan Active is having
the same problem.
The story leapfrogs across Alaska, as Active
chases down suspects and leads from Deadhorse to
Nome to Anchorage and back to Chukchi. One of
the best things about this series has been the
way Jones and now Watts capture Alaska in the
details as they work through their plots. This
is especially true with their depiction of the
predominantly Inupiat community of Chukchi. In
one particularly memorable scene, Active attends
an evening beach gathering that caps off the
town’s annual cleanup day, where of course, a
clue waits to be found:
“He picked out the rhythmic thwack of an Inupiat
dance drum and the cadence of an old chant from
a group of elders on one side of the fire. Bruce
Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” rolled out of a
boom box on the other side. From somewhere, the
mournful strains of a harmonica drifted through
the other music.
“A quartet of kids in dark hoodies skewered hot
dogs onto sticks to grill in the flames. A pair
of teenage break dancers, wearing sideways caps
and baggy sweats, attracted a circle of
clapping, shouting fans. A dozen or so of the
older crowd lounged in lawn chairs or on Army
blankets and blue tarps on the gravel beach.”
This idyllic moment is matched elsewhere, when
Active stops in to visit an elder:
“Millie set out a dented aluminum camp saucer
stacked with Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, along with
a knife and a jar of peanut butter. He hadn’t
had breakfast yet, and his mouth watered at the
thought of Sailor Boy. He spread peanut butter
on one of the pancake-sized crackers, took a big
bite, and let his eyes close in bliss. There was
nothing better than pilot bread with peanut
butter. Nothing.”
As I said, apart from its frighteningly high
murder rate, fictional Chukchi is an enticing
destination. It’s an older Alaska that can feel
lost in our present disarray, and it’s this,
along with solid plots and nicely developing
characters, that will keep readers returning to
the series.
Another element mystery writers have to properly
balance is the soap opera aspect. Active’s
backstory has developed nicely over the course
of the seven novels thus far. An Inupiat by
birth, he was raised in Anchorage by white
parents and has one foot in Western culture and
the other in his Native heritage. He’s married
and has a young child and an adopted older one.
Following his evolving relationship with his
wife, Grace, has been a mainstay in the recent
books, although here it takes more of a backseat
to the action than in previous volumes.
Other recurring characters include Active’s
deputy chief Danny Kavik, who is starting to get
his own subplot going, and bush pilot Cowboy
Decker, who could easily be spun off into his
own action series — looking at you, Stan Jones.
Longtime readers will welcome them back as
friends.
The most important element, however, is the
story itself, and “Ghost Light” delivers.
Despite the gore, Jones and Watts have
emphasized the investigative side of this story
rather than the action, appealing to their
readers’ intellects. They toss plenty of red
herrings at Active, and thus at readers, and
keep things going nicely to the conclusion.
Revealing more would spoil the fun. Head to
Chukchi and find out for yourself. Just be sure
to avoid becoming the next murder victim.
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based critic and
freelance writer. He can be reached at
nobugsinak@gmail.com.
Cathy G.
Cole, Amazon
Stan Jones' Nathan Active series
has long been my favorite mystery series set
in Alaska. Raised by white parents in
Anchorage, Active's job with the Alaska
Highway Patrol soon leads him to the small
Inupiat village of Chukchi on Alaska's north
coast where he is now Chief of Public Safety.
The backbone of this series is its depiction
of village life and how Active slowly becomes
a part of it and of his heritage.
Now married and with a small
child, Nathan finds monitoring Tommie Leokuk's
midnight rambles a tough assignment, and I
loved the solution one of his men came up
with. When you live in a small indigenous
village at the end of a very long food chain,
you have to think smart because there's just
no money available, and these "fixes" that
everyone comes up with are just one way
Chukchi village life feels so real.
Nathan's investigation leads
him to the oil fields and a phrase that I wish
would be erased from our vocabulary within my
lifetime ("Boys will be boys") to the streets
of Chukchi. The dead woman had two lovers, one
male and one female, and Active almost wore a
rut in the road being led in circles between
the two suspects. This is a mystery where
readers know one of two people did it, and
they have to wade through all the lies to
deduce which one is guilty.
Good-old fashioned armchair
sleuthing in a hostile, fascinating
environment that's brought to life by a
master. If you're a reader, this is one of
life's pleasures. If you're new to the series
and want to give it a try, start at the
beginning (White Sky Black Ice) so you won't
miss all-important character development.
Stephen R.
Street,
Amazon
I'll leave the literary reviews
to the pros. When you are reading a book and
you have to pause and you continue to think
about the story and the characters plus you
are anxious to return to reading, you know the
authors got something. Jones and Watts got
something. Hopefully another one is in the
works. Thank you Stan and Patricia.
Jan
Fries,
Amazon
This book was so intriguing I
literally could not put it down. I read it in
two days and was sorry at the end that I
hadn’t gone slower so I would’ve been able to
enjoy it longer. I have read all the Nathan
Active series, and this is one of my
favorites. The action goes from the north
slope oil fields to the village of Chukchi and
down into Anchorage, giving insights into life
on the pipeline as well as the village and the
cosmopolitan city of Anchorage. In this
installment, Nathan is battling PTSD from an
injury acquired in the previous book while
learning to be a father to both a newborn and
a teenager and simultaneously attempting to
unravel a mystery that has too many suspects
and not enough clues. It has been fun watching
Nathan‘s life unfold, but I enjoy learning
about the minor characters as well. All the
characters in the series come through as three
dimensional interesting people who I would
love to know better.
