Cold Company: An Alaska Mystery (Alaska Mystery Series)

In the ninth installment of Henry's critically acclaimed Alaskan mystery series, a murderer comes dangerously close to musher Jessie Arnold. When a body is discovered during the renovation of her home, Jessie learns it may be a victim of Alaska's most notorious serial killer. Soon after, another woman disappears in the same vicinity; Jessie suspects the killer is back at work...and that she may be the next victim. With her long knowledge of Alaska, her familiarity with the details of people and location, and her unerring sense of dramatic action, Sue Henry has made a legion of friends for Jessie Arnold as well as a name for herself as a first-rate novelist...not just a crime writer, but an author who seriously explores life and death in our harshest state.

Publishers Weekly

Alaskan musher Jessie Arnold has certainly used up more than nine lives even before the start of this ninth solid adventure in a series that has won both Anthony and Macavity awards. Fiercely independent and self-reliant to a fault, Jessie must confront inner fears as well as outside dangers as she sets about rebuilding her home (gutted in 2000's Beneath the Ashes) and restructuring her life (after a breakup that occurred in the same novel). First a skeleton turns up in the excavation of her new cabin site; then a possible link is found to murders committed decades earlier by Alaska's most notorious serial killer, Robert Hansen. Hansen's victims, some of whom were never found, had been buried along the nearby Knik River. Soon not only the cabin construction crew but forensic and police investigators, plus a relative of one of Hansen's victims still searching for answers, are prowling the wild and remote Knik Road that leads to Jesse's property. As murders new and old begin to unfold, Jesse has to learn to rely on others as well as on her own substantial survival skills to surmount human and natural pitfalls. One of the hallmarks of Henry's series is the beautiful and rugged Alaskan landscape, and she has never used it more effectively than she does here, as spring sets in motion new discoveries. And Jesse's continuing voyage of self-discovery should thrill old fans as well as expand her growing audience in the lower 48. (June 4) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Author : Sue Henry

Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers

Published Year : May 2003

Edition : Reissue

Format : Mass Market Paperback - Mass Market Paperback, 336 pages

Subject : Detective Fiction, Cozy Mysteries & Amateur Sleuths, Women Detectives - Fiction, Police Stories

Dimensions : 4.18 (w) x 6.75 (h) x 0.84 (d)

ISBN : 0380816857

ISBN13 : 9780380816859

Overview :

The summer solstice is near - bringing long sunlit days to the Alaskan wilderness - and for famed musher Jessie Arnold, the time has come to put the past behind her and move on. Building a new home for herself and her sled dogs on the charred ashes of her old one, she plans to be finished well before the onset of the long northern winter. But her progress is halted - chilling Jessie to the bone - when the excavations unearth a skeleton entombed in a crumbling basement wall. Twenty years earlier, a serial killer brutally murdered a number of women in the area. One of the fiend's victims disappeared wearing a butterfly pendant - a necklace similar, if not identical, to one discovered with the grisly human remains. A grim nightmare believed to be long over must now be revisited or, worse still, has been reborn. Because, once again, a local woman has disappeared without a trace. And, once again, Jessie is being pulled into a murder investigation against her will. Red roses are being sent to her anonymously - the gifts of a secret admirer who may also be a stone-cold killer. In this stark and lonely place, in the first days of the all-too-brief Alaskan summmer, the signs suggest the unthinkable: An insatiable human monster has returned . . . and Jessie Arnold may well be his next victim.