For me this series is definitely on a downhill fall. I haven’t yet looked up what the next book in the series is, I probably will eventually but it’s not a priority.

I don’t want to give away the main part of the ongoing series storyline - will it surfice to say that I hated what Stabenow did to the characters in this book. It’s something that authors with strong female characters seem compelled to do to their leads and I really think they’d be better writers if they found other ways to keep their characters on the bleeding edge of life. Maybe these characters are written to be so good at so many things that their authors have to give them something to be crap at and [spoiler whited out, highlight to read!] keeping boyfriends alive is something that they feel it’s reasonable to be bad at? I much prefer my characters to have realistic love lives - to be fair Kate’s never had one of those, but this was just a tedious step too far for me.

The plot of this individual series entry is almost a secondary concern, but I thought that was pretty lousy too. I still like Kate and her Alaskan setting and I’ll probably want to find out what happens next but I’m in no hurry to do so.