Murder on the Yukon Quest:: An Alaska Mystery (Alaska Mysteries) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

While most modern mysteries set in Alaska concentrate on the damage done to the ecology or the strange personalities who take refuge in this arctic vastness, Sue Henry's books are more straightforward and usually more fun. In such stories as Deadfall and the Anthony Award-winning Murder on the Iditarod Trail, Henry follows in the sled and snowshoe tracks of writers like Jack London and Robert W. Service, who realized that Alaska was the last great frontier of adventure. Her characters, like champion sled-dog racer Jessie Arnold, are welcome throwbacks to a simpler period when physical challenge was a healthy way to measure self-esteem.

Jessie is testing herself in the thousand-mile Yukon Quest race, which follows the old mail trail from Whitehorse to Fairbanks, when one of the other racers is kidnapped and held for ransom. The kidnappers insist that only Jessie can deliver the money, and it has to be on the most dangerous leg of the race. Any attempt to involve the police will result in the victim's death. Of course, the worst blizzard of the year blows up just as the race gets to that point, and it goes without saying that Jessie risks herself and her beloved dog team to recover the victim and capture the bad guys. Even if the thought of somebody shouting "Mush!" fills you with silent laughter, you're sure to be gripped by Henry's ability to recreate the pleasures and perils of an arcane sport in a breathtaking landscape. --Dick Adler -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

For mystery fans interested in the Alaskan wilderness, outdoor sports, or dogsled racing, Henry's latest will have lots of appeal. And even for readers who don't much care for dogs or sports, this well-crafted, suspense-filled story is still worth reading. Jessie Arnold has run the world-famous Iditarod dogsled race but is a rookie in the demanding Yukon Quest, which begins in Canada's Yukon Territory and extends over 1,000 dangerous miles to the finish line in Fairbanks. But Jessie has plenty of spirit and a fit, well-trained dog team. All of that hardly prepares her, however, for what happens when one of her fellow racers is kidnapped, and Jessie must deliver the ransom, rescue the victim, and capture the bad guys. The story is slow to get started, with the first 100 pages or so devoted to details about dogsled racing, but when the action kicks in, the story hurtles along agreeably to a surprising ending. Recommend this to fans of Nevada Barr. Emily Melton -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Seems like Jessie Arnold can't keep racing her beloved sled dogs without running into trouble. Not ordinary trouble like bad weather, red tape, sick dogs, accidents, frostbite, equipment failures, delays while she rescues other competitors, and the other things she expects to go wrong along the thousand-mile Yukon Quest from Whitehorse, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaskabut the homicidal kind of trouble that reduces cast members to corpses quicker than temperatures of 50 below. This year's murder of a dog handler is incidental to the main event: the kidnaping of veteran racer Jake Leland's stepdaughter Debbie Todd, a rookie whose first Yukon Quest is even more traumatic than Jessie's. The ransom note Jake gets forbids him to tell anyone about the abduction except for Jessie, and even promises that a second communication will wait till after Jessie gets into the checkpoint at Dawson. Despite the commendable ingenuity of Henry (Deadfall, 1998, etc.), though, in tying the Job-like ordeals of Jessie's race in to the kidnaping plot, the mystery unravels long before the end because Jessie can't stop herself from telling one person after another about Debbie, and because the murder victim is so unimportant and the suspects so interchangeable under those heavy parkas, and because the plot needs a flurry of coincidences to come to an ending. All the humans except Jessie herself finally come across as interlopers in the natural beauty and peril of the landscape. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Jessie Arnold is back racing across the frozen North with her sled dogs, but she's also in a race against time: a young racer has been abducted, the ransom demand is in, and the police are not to be told.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.