Lending a hand on a salmon boat under the Alaskan summer sun, Kate Shugak reels in some unusual suspects in the murder of a roundly despised commercial fisherman, including his troubled teenaged son and his less-than-grief-stricken widow. Like Nevada Barr , Dana Stabenow writes mysteries so firmly rooted in the natural world that their sense of place becomes a vital part of the plot. In this book about Native Alaskan crime solver Kate Shugak, the ocean and the men who fish it for salmon are described in such vivid detail that you'll never look at a salmon steak the same way again. When a particularly nasty fisherman is murdered, there's no end of suspects--including members of Kate's own family. The story also sports a richly ironic undertone of political incorrectness, as Kate muses about the forest rangers, "who wanted to annex every square foot of land they saw and keep it pristine and inviolate, unsullied by human hand. They failed to recall that the indigenous peoples who came across the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age had their hands all over anything that had the remotest possibility of nutritional value, and were every bit as much of the landscape and the wheel of life as the fish and the birds and the mammals." Previous Shugak sorties in paperback include Breakup , Blood Will Tell , Play with Fire , and A Cold-Blooded Business . Alaskan private investigator Kate Shugak (Breakup, LJ 6/1/97), who practically wallows in the surrounding wild beauty of nature, spars with an abusive, strikebreaking fisherman who later winds up dead. Kate's recently returned lover, enigmatic kin, and eccentric acquaintances make this a delightful read. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Kate Shugak, an Alaskan homesteader and private eye, is helping her uncle fish for salmon in an estuary near Prince William Sound. Cal Meany, a commercial fisherman, is abusing his family and bullying other anglers, including Kate's aunts. The aptly named Meany is murdered, and Kate's subsequent investigation is made especially hard because her aunts are suspects, salmon season is in full swing, and her lover, Jack Morgan, has arrived from Anchorage. Even though this is the eighth Kate Shugak novel, the series remains lively and suspenseful, with enjoyable characters. The case is challenging, the descriptions of the Alaskan landscape are compelling, and the passages on women hunters and on fishing compare favorably to nonfiction such as Mary Stange's Woman the Hunter (1997) and Holly Morris' fishing anthology, A Different Angle (1995). This novel is larger than the sum of its capably written parts, inspiring readers to step away from mysteries and fishing to consider bigger themes, such as love, life, death, and family. John Rowen Drift fisherman Calvin Meany is the kind of guy who bullies his wife, beats his son, drives a family away from its fishing site so that he can take it over, cuts his neighbor's nets in the hope of driving her off too, and breaks a strike against a big seafood buyer by continuing to fish with his indentured relatives. So it's no wonder that Kate Shugak, putting in time as a deck boss in sunny Cordova, finds him floating in Alaganik Bay stabbed, strangled, beaten, and drowned, as if whoever killed him wanted to make absolutely sure, or was just having a really good time. The problem with this summertime Alaska idyll is that Meany's death is greeted with such unanimous acclaim--``Did you see the body?'' his anxious widow asks Kate; ``Are you sure he's dead?''--that it's hard to get worked up over the hunt for his killer among the happily bereaved family, the neighbors whose land Meany had tirelessly sought to buy out from under them, and the subsistence fishers and small commercial rivals he made life miserable for. Like Breakup (1997), Kate's eighth is best approached as a leisurely guided tour of still another unexpected corner of the Yukon State, with crime and punishment taking a backseat, along with the large, colorful cast of extras. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.