Rating: 
Summary: A Cold Day for facts
Review: If you have any knowledge of the geography or lifestyle of Alaska, this is the book for you, for laughs.The author takes great pains to create a background, including factoids and details that do not relate to the story, unfortunately they are incredibly wrong. She apparently has read a great deal about the state and then taken great liberty with the organization of the information. As a resident of the state of Alaska, the locale of the story, I found it incredubly distracting to be presented with such frequent misinformation. Perhaps there is a good story in here somewhere, I was prevented from enjoying it due to the poorly presented background. I hope her books in other locations are more accurate, for the sake of those who know the area.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Mystery Based on Native American Culture
Review: In A Cold Day For Murder Dana Stabenow's portrayal of Kate Shugak as a strong, sad, solitary woman, willing to help anyone in need, captures the reader's heart. Intertwined with the disappearance of the park ranger, who Kate sets out to find, is the plight of Native Americans struggling to hold on to their traditions while faced with changes forced on them by government regulations. I look forward to reading the other books in this series to see how Kate evolves as she takes on other cases.
Rating: 
Summary: An Impressive debut
Review: Kate Shugak is a loner. She's a loner on a homestead on federal land in Alaska. She's a loner because she killed a child abuser years ago and it haunts her. It left physical and mental scars. All of this makes Kate a unique personality in mystery fiction. But she also has friends-half the people on the tribal grounds are relatives and many of the others are good friends. They add more unique flavor to this mystery. Kate is called in to find a friend who went missing while searching for a congressman's son who is missing. During the investigations, all of these unique personalities come together along with plenty of other local flavoring. Dana Stabenow has created a compelling, sympathetic series family. I hope to see a lot more of Stabenow and Shugak.
Rating:
Summary: Pleasingly Different
Review: The first in the Kate Shugak series, this book begins a tad slowly...and the reader might want to put the book down and forget it. But that would be a big mistake, as I soon found out! Because this is not only the story of a truly unique PI, hardboiled and independent Aleut native Kate Shugak, but also the story of an entire subculture that lives in temperatures and conditions that would probably kill the rest of us. I speak of rural Alaska--and if you didn't know much about it before reading this book, you sure will by the time you are done. Although there is a mystery and a crime to be solved in this book, the star is Alaska itself and the very independent characters who populate its sparse and frozen countryside. The story itself concerns the disappearance of an overeager park ranger who just happens to be the son of a U.S. Senator back on the mainland. And the FBI agent originally sent to find the ranger is missing as well. Kate is asked to step in, which she does very reluctantly. But this reader was much more fascinated with Kate's living conditions than the plot. Perhaps later in the series, the plot and description of the countryside even out. It's enough to make me want to keep reading!
Rating:
Summary: A candidate to replace Hillerman?
Review: There's a lot to like about A COLD DAY FOR MURDER. Kate Shugak is a much more realistic character than most female private eyes on the best-seller list. She's an Aleut Indian and former investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney's office, but at the beginning of the story, she's returned home to the Alaskan northland, sulking about a case gone wrong during which she was brutally injured. She's been hiding out, pretty much living a hermit's existence when Jack Morgan, her former boss and lover, shows up to ask her to investigate the disappearance of a Park Ranger, who's been missing for six weeks, and one of his investigators who went looking for him. Coincidentally, the park ranger is also a Congressman's son.
The best part of the book is the atmosphere. It's cold up there and people get around by snow machine and plane or helicopter. Everything is expensive because it must be flown in. There's moose hunting and played out gold and silver mines and drunken Aleuts whose favorite pastime is fighting. The Aleut families are close-knit and there is reverence for seniors, as is evidenced by Ekaterina, Kate's grandmother, one of the first people Kate talks to about the case. She's the former president of the Native American Council and she plays dumb about what happened. The Aleuts hate Outsiders and a missing park ranger doesn't concern them much.
The structure of A COLD DAY FOR MURDER is pretty straight-forward. Shugak, and her dog Mutt, a part wolf Siberian husky, track the ranger's movements the day he disappeared. He wasn't too popular, being a greenie and all and recommending that the park be opened for Outsiders. The dialogue is sometimes repetitive and any astute reader can figure out who done it by about mid book. But I'm so starved for a Hillerman replacement that I plan to order another Kate Shugak mystery.
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