Storm and rocks in the North Pacific by Nocturnal Lynx Photography

When the body of an influential visitor washes up on a remote Alaskan beach, Danny, Ava, and Cam find themselves in a storm of trouble. New to this series? Check out Part I here  and Part II here.

Meet Kedric introduces a new character to the narrative, law enforcement officer Scott Kedric. In Alaska, law enforcement aren’t always the good guys– and Officer Kedric is no exception.

Warning: this episode contains imagery that may be disturbing for veterans and those who have experienced violence at the hands of law enforcement.

Village Public Safety Officer Scott Kedric hated the rain, which made it especially ironic that he was perpetually posted where the weather did little else.

The sedate drizzles of summer had given way to August and September’s storms, and the trailing edge of some big tropical number was hammering the Alaskan coast for all it was worth. Icy rain pelted his face with the ferocity of thrown gravel and trickled in cold rivulets down his collar. Kedric gritted his teeth as he eased the state-issued watercraft around the docks, hunting for a tell-tale flash of bright blue.

A delegation of Resource Management officials had arrived on a private flight that morning, and already one of the city slickers was missing. He’d wandered away from the group’s minder as the delegation toured the waterfront tourist shops.

A former banker from Oregon, Randall Johnson brought investment savvy and a hint of greenie tree-hugger sensibilities to the State’s Board of Resource Management. It was common knowledge that he wasn’t well-liked by the pro-Conlin crowd, and there were plenty of off-duty miners out despite the rain. Resource Management wasn’t particularly well liked by the Alaska Native population, either, so it was anybody’s guess who’d nabbed the guy.

Unfortunately it fell to VPSO Kedric to find the man, or whatever was left of him. Kedric swore under his breath and fervently wished that someone could have offed the greenie in decent weather. Preferably in a village that wasn’t in his jurisdiction.

Continue reading “Between A Rock & A Storm Part III: Meet Kedric”

This week on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews a book about his home town that gets almost everything wrong. That’s right, it’s Craig Martelle’s Endure: End Times in Alaska!

Cover of Endure: End Times in Alaska

Endure has garnered a lot of criticism for eschewing the explicit violence, conservative values, and thinly-veiled racism that are common components of the Post-Apocalyptic genre. I have no problem with that. The problem lies in the fact that Martelle hasn’t replaced the those themes with anything of substance. There’s no conflict. There’s never any real sense that Chuck and his family are in jeopardy. Endure is a survival story without the survival.

Today on the author blog, Leland Lydecker reviews Trackers: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith.
Warning: contains spoilers.

As the title suggests, the Trackers series chronicles the struggles of the survivors of an apocalyptic event. That event is the detonation of several high-altitude EMPs over the contiguous United States. The attack is ostensibly retaliation for an ill-conceived mission which liberated the granddaughter of a US Senator from a North Korean prison camp.

Trackers begins with the inciting raid, then cuts to the day of the EMP strike. In regards to the science of the attack and how it might realistically be carried out, Sansbury Smith did his homework. Trackers contains one of the more believable end-of-the-world scenarios I’ve read.

The meat of the story concerns a gruesome murder mystery playing out at the same time as the attack and its aftermath. Compared to the stagnant fare of “the world is screwed and we’re trying to stay alive” that dominates the Post-Apocalyptic genre, this premise comes across as fresh and interesting. The rest of the novel, sadly, is more standard post-apocalyptic fare.