A Cold War
By Allan Russell; Thomas & Mercer; $15.95
The blurb: Nina Granville believes her business trip to Alaska will give her a short respite from the merry-go-round that came with her engagement to Congressman Terrence Donnelly. But instead of allowing her the peace she craves, Nina's getaway from the public eye means that no one witnesses her abduction into a very cold hell.
Taken by a mountain man who calls himself Baer and then transported to a remote cabin surrounded by nothing but frozen wilderness, Nina descends into a nightmare of terror, privation and bitter cold. Nina's privileged life did not prepare her for imprisonment at the hands of this survivalist trapper. If she is to live — and escape — Nina realizes she must do it on her own.
Undaunted and with startling determination, Nina pits herself against her captor, her fear and nature itself. But can she win against such a deadly opponent?
Excerpt: She reeled in her line and then tried a second cast. As Baer had shown her, she let the current take the jig. After it played out, she began cranking the reel. That's when Nina noticed the pull. There was a fish on the other end of the line.
The exhilaration of the moment was something she hadn't expected. It felt like an electric charge that extended from the line to the rod to her arms. She began reeling and pulling, then forced herself to slow down. It was important she land the fish. She could see it now in the clear water. Colors flashed: hues of pink, blue and gold. But instead of smoothly bringing the fish to shore, she panicked as the grayling fought back, and she made the mistake of jerking hard on the line. Luckily for her, the yank cleared the fish out of the water, but that wasn't the same as landing it. When the grayling hit the shore, the hook came free, and it began thrashing up and down; each flip and flop brought it closer to the water.
Nina fell to her knees and tried grabbing the fish. One moment she had it, but the next it wriggled free.
"No!" she cried.
The grayling was almost to the water. She grabbed a fist-size river rock and pounced on the fish. Before it could make its escape, she brought the stone down on its head, stunning it. The grayling's thrashing slowed, but it still wasn't dead. Nina raised the stone, then brought it down again, this time with killing force.
As she caught her breath, Nina's eyes stayed on the fish. In death its colors were fading. While alive, its speckled belly had looked as if gold dust had been sprinkled over it, but now that ore-like sunshine was turning gray. Dead fish eyes looked at her. Nina wasn't sure what she felt.
"Good fish."
Baer's voice came from directly behind her and made Nina start. Not for the first time, she wondered how a big man could move so stealthily. He picked up the fish, made quick work of it with his knife, and then laid it down on the moss. There were four fish in total; Baer had caught two more in that short time.
She watched as he made his way downstream. He picked up his rod and started fishing again. It was a signal for Nina to do the same. She got to her feet, and only then noticed the mud and blood on her hands. She bent down at the bank and rinsed her hands in the cold water, fighting the urge to pull them out before they were completely clean. Her fingers felt like icicles. She wrung her hands and then blew on them.
Until I escape, Nina thought, cold hands are just one more thing to endure. She picked up the rod and cast her line.
A Mile North of Good and Evil
By Charles D. Hayes; Autodidactic Press; $21.95
The blurb: In this sequel to "Portals in a Northern Sky," author Charles D. Hayes delivers another engrossing adventure set in the Alaska wilderness and populated with a colorful cast. "A Mile North of Good and Evil" invites readers to imagine the potential of visual time travel and to contemplate ideas ranging from the inner thoughts of psychopaths to the possibility of total human extinction.
It's 2028, seven years after the introduction of the Portals System, and the world is on the brink of all-out war. Now known as Adam 21, the Portals technology offers the ability to look back in time and view any event in history from any angle. As a result, new animosities have been unleashed worldwide, based on old ethnic wounds and past aggressions. "A Mile North of Good and Evil" opens as the turmoil becomes explosive. Bold, creative action is needed.
Excerpt: Sometimes he wondered if his 30-plus years as a cop had gotten the best of him. After all, his AARP membership card was starting to yellow. He had little to show for all those years of work. True, he had put away some bad people, very bad people indeed, but if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.
Vince's time with the Dallas police department was interrupted a year after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, when he reenlisted as a Marine. He was assigned to a military police unit and then quickly reassigned to duty as a brig warden, spending 18 months with North Vietnamese POWs and more than eight years with service members convicted of crimes following the Marines' withdrawal from Vietnam. After 10-plus years, he quit. He would not discuss his time served or even mention his service to other ex-Marines. When he returned to police work after the war, he was a changed man, and now his dreams were frequently haunted by lifeless faces of the North Vietnamese.
No longer a cop, Vince was now a security consultant, a private investigator of sorts. He was semi-retired, but the job he'd recently accepted was rekindling some of his old habits. Lying there in the dark, he returned to imagining the identity of his prey.
One of Alaska's richest men had persuaded Vince to take on an unsolved murder case. Buck Sandburg wanted to find out who had killed his granddaughter on Alaska's Parks Highway. She was murdered seven years ago, in the fall of the same year that Vince and his niece and Ginger had arrived in the state. He'd heard about the incident but had been too busy getting settled to pay much attention. Now the trail was bone cold. It seemed the old man had stewed and festered about it for years before deciding it was the one last thing he had left to do before he died.
The more Vince looked into the matter, the more baffling it became. Every fall but one during the past seven years, homicides had occurred along highways from southwest Missouri to Alaska. But the territory was so big and the incidents so spread out that it was exceptionally hard to detect a pattern unless, of course, you were looking for one. There were 23 known victims, 21 women and two men. Why the disparity? Common sense suggested it was because these murders were all seemingly associated with hitchhiking, even a mail carrier, whose delivery van had been found broken down six miles from her body. She must have needed a ride.
But maybe he was missing something; perhaps it wasn't that simple. And why, for God's sake, were the crimes so dissimilar? Several of the killings that appeared to have been planned were followed by others that seemed impulse-driven. Could he be dealing with two serial killers whose methods were eerily similar and whose timing was coincidental, or was it just one killer trying to confuse the authorities into thinking there is more than one. What were the odds of that? Hell, what were the odds of Mount Vesuvius blowing its top? Probably not very good, but then it had happened a dozen or so times in the past 2,000 years.