Play With Fire
Kate Shugak #5
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4.2 • 124 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A mushroom hunting foray turns gruesome when Kate Shugak stumbles across a burnt and decaying corpse amid a grove of morels. Was the deceased the hapless victim of last year's forest fire? Why has no one reported him missing? And why wasn't he wearing any clothes? Absent evidence of foul play, the state troopers are inclined to call it death by misadventure; Kate's investigative instincts suggest otherwise, leading her down a path that requires she confront issues of community, faith, and free will.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The crisp crunch of snow gives way to mosquitos and mushrooms as both cold weather-loving Kate Shugak and her latest adventure wilt in the warmth of an Alaskan June. Kate and photojournalist Dinah Cookman are harvesting forest mushrooms when they discover a naked, much-decomposed corpse and call in a trooper, who says that no one within 100 miles has been reported missing in the last year. But then the grandson of the local Bible-thumping preacher asks Kate to find his missing father, Daniel. The corpse is identified as the boy's father's and, while the police suspect no foul play, Kate wonders how the man died. Few share her curiosity: the boy asks her to stop investigating, and other locals answer her questions evasively. Then a gang of thugs wrecks her camp and injures Dinah. Even readers sympathetic to Stabenow's (A Cold-Blooded Business) plot-linked message on religious intolerance will struggle with the crudely inserted mushroom lore and other extraneous material that doesn't even yield a credible red herring. Maybe the likable Kate will perk up again when the temperature plummets. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
As usual, made me look up quite a few things
But I always enjoy that.
I have quite a few bones to pick with the "Christians" who have stripped culture, language, and spirituality from First Peoples, in the Americas, as well as anywhere in the colonies of the French, British, and other European nations. I have a pet peeve about the extinction of languages, as it is.
Learning about Kate's college experiences helps flesh out her background, and the whys of her motivations. I love how many people want to breed Mutt.
The bits with the clueless tourists were hilarious.
I did spot the likely cause of death early on, and suspected who was behind it. I hope the orchestrator of the death and other evil deeds is found, in a later book, to have received comeuppance.
Play with Fire
I now have read or listened to every one of the Kate Shugak and the Liam Campbell books by Dana Stabenow. I enjoyed all of the books immensely. Her characters are real with flaws as we all are. Thank you and I look forward to more in the future. Well worth the read!!
Play with Fire - Exceptional Story!
A real page turner, I could not put this book down!