The Big Empty

October 15, 2018
In Jones’s intriguing sixth outing for Native Alaskan public safety director Nathan Active (after 2016’s Tundra Kill), the first in the series to be coauthored with Watts (The Frayer), Nathan’s bush pilot friend, Cowboy Decker, persuades him to look into the deaths of Evie Kavoonah and her physician fiancé, Todd Brenner. The couple were killed after the Cessna Evie had been piloting smashed into a mountain, a tragedy that federal investigators concluded was due to pilot error. Despite his skepticism, Nathan agrees to travel with Cowboy to the site of the wreckage, where they discover evidence of sabotage. Meanwhile, Nathan and his wife, Grace, are expecting their first child, a development that will complicate their relationship with Grace’s teenage daughter, Nita. Nita’s father is Grace’s father, who raped her years before her marriage to Nathan. Though the whodunit story line may be unexceptional, it’s buttressed by the family melodrama and the authors’ insights into the culture of Alaska’s indigenous peoples.

December 1, 2018
In this sixth Police Chief Nathan Active outing (after Tundra Kill, 2016), a plane crash in Alaska's desolate Big Empty country makes murder suspects out of Active's Chukchi neighbors, including his friend Cowboy Decker. The gossip river that runs through the small town brings all sorts of wild speculation in its wake. Decker realizes that the evidence against him personally is slim, but he wants justice for his prot�g�e, the plane's pilot, contending that the malfunction that led to the crash was rigged. Another murder occurs, and, as readers accompany Active on his interviews, they gain a rich insight into the lives of the Inupiat and the naluaqmiu (white inhabitants) on the vanishing frontier. There is also some domestic drama involving Active's daughter, who is being cyberbullied on Facebook. Jones' and coauthor Watts' prose has been called muscular and stark, but it has an inviting cinematic quality to it as well. A well-constructed mystery recommended for fans of C. J. Box and Craig Johnson.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)