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Welcome to the official web site of mystery author Stan Jones! Village of the Ghost Bears
You
can’t fake the stuff that Stan Jones pulls off
in VILLAGE OF THE GHOST BEARS (Soho,
$24), the fourth mystery in his series about
Nathan Active, an Eskimo state trooper whose beat
covers the most remote regions of Alaska. A writer
of muscular words and stark images, Jones sets up
his scenes like film shots: the daredevil
maneuvers of a bush pilot landing on a lake; herds
of caribou crossing the mountains to winter
grounds; a body floating gently on the current of
a stream, its flesh eaten by pike. This kind of
writing makes for strong reading, especially with
a sturdy murder plot to give it structure. Make
that two plots: one involving the unidentified
corpse, the other an arson case that claims the
lives of eight citizens of Chukchi, a frontier
town of wooden houses and steel backbones. Active
knows the territory and understands the regional
psychology. What he can’t grasp is the brute
instinct that makes people destroy the peace of
such a majestic environment. — Marilyn
Stasio, Dec. 13, 2009 New York Times As
readers of Stan Jones’s Nathan Active series know,
Alaska State Trooper Active would like nothing
more than to transfer out of the town of Chukchi
and head back to Anchorage. But while he’s
waiting, someone burns down Chukchi’s recreation
center, killing not only the town’s star
basketball player but also its chief of police.
The city cop Alan Long isn’t up to solving the
crime, which soon has Nathan trying to figure out
the connection between the fire and the trade in
polar bear parts, a dead hunter at a remote spot
called One-Way Lake, and the seemingly crazy twin
brother of a woman killed in a plane crash. The
book is filled with the details of Inupiat life,
like a caribou carcass being cut apart in the
living room of a local home. – Amy Virshup, Dec.
16, 2009 People Magazine In
the fourth book of this enchanting series set in
Alaska, a hunter turns up dead and faceless in a
remote lake the same week a rec center fire takes
the lives of eight locals. It falls to State
Trooper Nathan Active to figure out if the two
events were accidents or crimes— and whether
they're somehow linked. Following clues all the
way to the tiny Arctic village of Cape Goodwin
("famous for twins, polar bears and
schizophrenia"), Active brings the reader along on
a wild ride through rugged Inupiat (Eskimo)
country. Jones's prose is sometimes too pulpy, but
he's created a richly populated universe you'll be
sorry to leave. Three stars. — Brian Braiker,
Dec. 7, 2009
USA Today Readers
hungry for an authentic portrait of our 49th state
— beyond what we've learned since Sarah
Palin stepped onto the national stage — will
be mesmerized by this chilling tale that starts
with the deaths of eight people in a fire at the
town of Chukchi's rec center. Was it arson or
accident? Village of the Ghost Bears is
the fourth in Stan Jones' series starring Alaska
State Trooper Nathan Active. Readers attracted to
novels with a profoundly rich sense of place will
find much to love here as Active undertakes a
dogged and risky search for the possible killer.
Painterly descriptions of Alaska's natural beauty
and the lives of the native people are
fascinating. — Carol Memmott,Dec. 31, 2009 Entertainment Weekly You
can almost hear the wind screaming across miles of
bleak tundra and frozen lakes in Ghost Bears, the
fourth outing for Alaska state trooper and native
Inupiat Nathan Active, who's still posted in the
godforsaken Arctic Circle village of Chukchi.
Jones delivers a finely laddered plot — involving
deadly arson at a local recreation center and a
faceless body discovered at a remote campsite —
but the real fun, as always, lies in the dozens of
mini-lessons he gives on hardscrabble Alaskan
life, covering everything from the illegal trade
in polar-bear bladders to the description of a
potent indigenous chewing tobacco made from burnt
birch-tree fungus. A-. — Tina Jordan Tucker
Boston Globe In
this installment of Stan Jones’s series featuring
Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active, Nathan’s
backcountry camping trip with his girlfriend is
disrupted by two grim incidents. First they find
the decomposing corpse of a hunter. Then Nathan
gets word that he is needed back in Chukchi, where
a suspicious fire has killed over half a dozen
people, including the police chief, a terrible
toll in this small Inuit community. Nathan soon
realizes that the two incidents are somehow
connected with the illicit trade in polar bear
gallbladders, a desirable commodity in Asian
markets. Jones
constructs a satisfyingly complex plot, leaving it
to the location to provide the atmosphere. This is
Alaska’s Far North, a forbidding landscape of gray
and brown and icy white, of craggy mountain ranges
and Arctic coastal villages where ramshackle
buildings ride the permafrost on stilts, grannies
butcher caribou on the kitchen floor, and lawmen
tracking a killer rely on daredevil bush pilots to
fly them from one location to another. In
his knowledgeable and nuanced evocation of Native
America, Jones bears a gratifying resemblance to
Tony Hillerman, the late grand master. – Amanda Heller,
December 27, 2009 Fairbanks Daily
News-Miner Novelist
and longtime Alaskan Stan Jones has been on a
winning streak with his Nathan Active Mysteries,
and with the latest installment, “Village of the
Ghost Bears,” he shows no sign of sagging. For
those who haven’t delved into this series yet, it
follows the career of Active, an Alaska State
Trooper posted in the fictional town of Chukchi, a
remote village on Alaska’s northwestern shore
that’s patterned on Kotzebue. Active
is an Inupiat Native who was born in Chukchi, but
who was adopted by white teachers and raised in
Anchorage. If
Active had his druthers, he’d still be in
Anchorage, patrolling the state’s largest
metropolis. For
now, however, he’s stuck in his birthplace,
getting reacquainted with his real mother and
slowly learning about his Native heritage while he
awaits a transfer. He
isn’t bored though, because Chukchi seems to have
an alarmingly high murder rate, an unfortunate
crime statistic that keeps his career, and this
series, in high gear. Active’s
latest adventure opens with a camping trip to
One-Way Lake, an idyllic getaway deep in the
Brooks Range, where he and his girlfriend Grace
have gone to spend some quiet time together. Their
romantic trip is quickly disrupted, however, by
their discovery of a body in the lake. The corpse
belongs to a man who apparently fell to his death
from the cliff above the lake. All the evidence
points to an accident, but because the man wasn’t
carrying identification, and because the pike in
the lake have eaten away his face, who he was
remains a mystery. Before
Active can pursue this finding any further,
however, the couple’s trip is brought to an even
more abrupt halt by the return of Cowboy Decker,
the bush pilot who flew them into the mountains
and who has come back to retrieve them ahead of
schedule. As
he explains to Active, the community recreation
center in Chukchi has burned to the ground,
killing several people including the town’s chief
of police. Active
returns to Chukchi to join the investigation of
the fire, which may or may not be arson, leaving
the body in One-Way Lake as an afterthought. But
as everyone who reads mysteries knows,
coincidences are always more than they initially
seem. Somehow that body is going to be tied to the
fire, and the fun will come in finding out how the
author pulls it all together. Those
who have already encountered this series will know
that the outcome will be both clever and
unexpected, because Jones is quite adept at the
sort of plot twists that keep readers guessing. As
with the previous installments in this series,
“Village of the Ghost Bears” is tightly written,
fast moving and driven by believable characters.
There are a couple of false leads that send Active
and his compatriots scurrying in the wrong
direction, but by the end the various loose ends
will all be tied up into a neat little knot that
makes perfect sense. Initial
suspicion falls on a former Chukchi resident named
Jae Hyo Lee, a Korean who had recently been
released from federal prison in Oregon after
serving a term for trafficking in polar bear
bladders. Lee had blamed the deceased police chief
for his arrest, and had been overheard vowing to
kill him when he was freed. To
complicate matters, Lee had received a visit from
a local ne’er-do-well named Tom Gage shortly
before he left prison. What
the two discussed is unknown, but Gage, along with
several other men, had subsequently been trapped
in the sauna at the recreation center when the
fire broke out. The door had apparently been wired
shut and none were able to escape. As
Active pursues these leads, Jones is able to delve
into the racial tensions that exist in Chukchi.
This is one of the elements that lends
authenticity to this series. Chukchi is populated
by three main racial groups, the Natives who have
always lived there, the whites who came later, and
the Koreans who are the most recent arrivals and
who control most of the restaurants and hotels in
town. These
three groups coexist in an uneasy standoff with
each other, and Jones, to his credit, doesn’t try
to paper over their conflicts. Having lived in
Kotzebue, Jones is familiar with the racial
divides in rural Alaska, and he doesn’t try to
sweeten them with a false sense of political
correctness. Nor
does he condemn the situation. He merely presents
it as a fact of village life, an approach that
helps make his writing ring true. Jones
also evokes the arctic landscape handily and with
minimal fuss, as in this passage from his opening
page: “One-Way Lake was a blue teardrop cupped in
the foothills of the Brooks Range, with caribou
trails lacing the ridges on either side. The
outlet, One-Way Creek, lined with stunted black
spruce and a few cottonwoods gone gold, threaded
south across the rusting fall tundra toward the
Isignaq River. At the lake’s head, wavelets licked
a fan-shaped talus under a steep slope of
gray-brown shale. More caribou trails cut across
its face.” Similar
descriptions
of arctic beauty — as well as the corresponding
ugliness of arctic settlements — fill the story as
it careens from Chukchi to the nearby village of
Cape Goodwin and on up to Barrow. I
won’t reveal any more details of that story here.
Suffice to say that Jones constructs welldefined
characters, crafts a believable plot and keeps his
writing sharp and to the point throughout. The
result is another great entry in what has become
one of the best things going in Alaska fiction. — David James, Dec.
27, 2009 Publishers Weekly, Starred
Review Jones,
who's
been a bush pilot and an investigative reporter,
brings stomach-wrenching verisimilitude to crimes
despoiling the land and the people, while he
sensitively renders the tender, painful romance
between Nathan and Grace. His sympathetic
portrayal of Alaska's mixed-ethnic traditions is a
tribute to both the state and the states of mind
it inspires. Kirkus Reviews, Starred
Review Multi-layered
characters
and an offbeat setting authentically
rendered—Jones bids fair to become the Tony
Hillerman of Alaska. Booklist "Nathan
is a likable series lead, capable, depending on
the situation, of touching tenderness or unbending
strength. Fans of other Alaska-set series—Dana
Stabenow’s atmospheric Kate Shugak novels and John
Straley’s rather more traditional books featuring
private investigator Cecil Younger—will embrace
the Active novels but don’t stop there: recommend
this one to anyone who enjoys a stylishly written,
solidly plotted mystery. Library Journal Readers
get a crash course in living in remote Alaska and
a mighty fine mystery as well. Comparable to
Alaska mysteries by Dana Stabenow and Mike Doogan,
this series should get more exposure than it does. Mystery Gazette Inupiaq
Alaskan state trooper Nathan Active is camping
with his beloved Grace when they find a corpse in
a creek. The pike had eaten away the face of the
deceased. Soon
afterward someone sets a fire to the recreation
center in the remote village of Chukchi. Eight
people including the police chief die in the
deadly inferno. Nathan
investigates
both cases of homicide. At the same time, apparent
polar bear poaching, an illegal act as the animal
is protected by law, makes his inquiry much more
dangerous and convoluted especially the body in
the brook inquiry. The
latest Nathan Active police procedural (see Frozen
Sun) is a terrific Alaskan thriller that hooks the
reader early with its stark beautiful description
of remote Alaska mostly from an aerial view.
Nathan is his super self working exciting twisting
investigations into homicides and poaching that
look like Bridges to Nowhere except for his
diligence, and his romance enhances the plot as he
turns to a native healer for advice. However,
Alaska owns this super tale as Stan Jones provides
a deep look at a remote part of the state. — Harriet Klausner Thomas Perry “Trooper Nathan Active's
beat is a few outposts in a remote, frigid world. But wherever people
live, they bring greed, madness, and death.
Active's courageous and stubborn determination to
gather the scattered bits of evidence make Stan
Jones's Village of the Ghost Bears a fascinating
rendition of the human struggle for truth. — Thomas Perry is
the author of Runner and Vanishing Act |
