A trio of northern-based thrillers found their way onto my iPad and came along with me on a recent road trip around Alaska, providing entertainment in the wee hours before I drifted off to sleep. The first one was a dud, the second a lot of fun, even if it lacked literary merit. The third was exceptional. So in that order, here are the recaps.
Far-fetched fiction
"A Cold War" by Alan Russell (Thomas & Mercer) opens in Seward, where newly married Elese Martin departs a cruise ship to go shopping and never returns. Her husband Greg winds up in the office of police Sgt. Evan Hamilton, who can't get past his suspicion that Martin is somehow involved, but he has no evidence to support the theory.
The story jumps ahead three years and we find Nina Granville, a New York socialite and the fiancee of a Kennedy-like politician named Terrence Donnelly in Fairbanks. She is abducted by a grubby Bush dweller and survivalist named Baer.
With winter closing in, Baer drags Nina off to his remote cabin in Interior Alaska, where he informs her she's his new wife and keeps her caged much of the time. Lovely. As the story unfolds, Nina, a city girl and dedicated vegetarian, learns how to survive in the wilderness and starts plotting her escape, aided by a journal she discovers that was left behind by the last Mrs. Baer.
Meanwhile Donnelly has his men on the case and offers a tidy reward for anyone who can locate his missing bride-to-be. Greg Martin, convinced that Nina's disappearance is tied to his own wife's, returns to Seward where he and Hamilton form an uneasy alliance as they begin picking up the trail.
The plot is more than a bit far-fetched and what should be the climactic moment comes too soon and lacks drama. The remainder of the book then shifts to California and turns into a bit of a social-justice-inspired twist ending that is neither believable nor particularly well suited to the story up to that point. In fact, it seems more than anything to be tacked on primarily to compensate for the fact that this is, overall, a rather misogynistic novel.
‘Squall’ entertains from beginning to end
Moving over to northern Canada, "Squall" by Sean Costello (Red Tower Publications) is also partly set in a remote cabin. This one starts in Toronto, where a bumbling heroin addict named Dale Knight is trying to break into the trafficking business through his well-connected brother. He and his cocaine-drenched girlfriend, Ronnie Saxon, are tasked with making a delivery for the city kingpin, but Ronnie has other plans. When they arrive at the drop-off point Ronnie busts in, shoots the customers and grabs the money and drugs. Bad move. One has to wonder if the woman ever sat still long enough to watch the movie "No Country for Old Men" (she certainly wouldn't have read the book).
Knowing they're toast if caught, Dale, who wishes he'd never gotten involved, takes Ronnie and heads north for his uncle's cabin to lay low. It's there that a bush pilot named Tom Stokes comes quite literally crashing into the scene.
Meanwhile, Dale's brother Ed, who has to sacrifice his kin to save his skin, quickly figures out where Dale has gone and dispatches a pair of hired killers to resolve the situation. What transpires is a series of chases zigzagging between northern Ontario and Toronto, with a massive winter storm to complicate matters.
Costello doesn't waste time trying to write the great Canadian novel, he just piles on the action, with lots of humor along the way. The characters are fun and the story hooked me in so much that I found myself reading the entire thing in one sitting. Perfect brain candy for a vacation.
‘Zodiac Station’ a well-crafted yarn
By far the best of the three, however, was "Zodiac Station" by Tom Harper (HarperCollins), a psychological and scientific mystery set in the distant Arctic on a fictional island named Utgard where scientists and oil prospectors share space with an abandoned Soviet coal mine and lots of polar bears.
The book opens in a manner reminiscent of "Frankenstein" when the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker encounters a man who comes stumbling out of the sea ice and fog, proclaiming himself the lone survivor of an explosion that destroyed Zodiac Station, Utgard's scientific outpost. Brought onboard, he relates his story to the ship's captain, Carl Franklin (good move, that, naming an Arctic captain Franklin).
Meanwhile, helicopters from the ship head to Utgard, where they locate two more survivors. As their accounts are shared, what emerges is a story of scientific rivalries, a mysterious death that might have been a murder or suicide, undetermined research from the deceased scientist, possible sabotage, murky governmental and corporate involvement, paranoia, climate change, conspiracies that may or may not exist and plenty of other monkey business amid extreme cold, winds and snow, all of it leading up to the explosion that killed nearly everyone at the station.
Harper does a remarkable job of sending his characters and his readers down a multitude of dead ends, with half the inhabitants of the station emerging at one point or another as the likely suspect, only to have the suspicion shift once again. Then he ties it all up neatly with an entirely unexpected conclusion.
This one is finely crafted and depends primarily on exceedingly well-developed characters, shifting viewpoints, and building suspense. It kept me up until 2 a.m. finishing it off. It also got me through to the end of this summer's Alaska road trip. A good mental break to go along with the physical one.
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer and critic.