Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

5/7/17: This is an addendum to the long discussion below that took place after this book. It refers to the book that just came out, nearly four years later, the promised "Kate Shugak" that would tell us what actually happened after the cheap, cliffhanger ending to this one. I imagine all Stabenow's fans are reading the new one avidly as we speak, but I wanted to comment on the first paragraph, in light of the discussion below and several readers' comments about "phoning it in:" "The body had been found early on by a raven, that inevitable first responder to carcasses in the wild. It perched on a crag and waited for signs of life before calling in the rest of the unkindness." Stabenow, Dana (2017-05-06). Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21) (Kindle Locations 9-10). Gere Donovan Press. Kindle Edition. Is it just me, or is this Stabenow's way of taking a jab at those of us who expressed our disappointment at the book? Because otherwise, it's a very odd sentence to begin a book with. It wasn't us being "unkind," it was an author we liked very much, one who produced a "fake book" that was nothing like the ones she actually wrote in the series. We're the ones who paid for it, and we're the ones who noticed that we'd been insulted. I'm currently in the new one, and she seems to be, if anything, overcompensating for the failure of this one, but I can live with that, because she does seem to have written it. I first discovered the Kate Shugak books when I lived in Alaska for seven years as a mental health clinician. I loved the way Stabenow illustrated the quirky lifestyles of most Alaskans both native and otherwise, and she made my own observations intelligible to me in many ways. After we returned to the "Lower 48," I continued to read every book and was never disappointed, until this one. I should say that I include the Liam Campbell series in my mind as I make these comments, because those books are quite similar, and Liam and Kate even get together in one of the most recent Kate books. Dana is a good, competent writer. She is not a great writer, but she has created a set of characters who are very engaging and funny, and her depictions of Alaskan life are spot on. I do not understand her tendency to kill off principle characters, but thus far, I have been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, although I tend to think these deaths are more of a cheap device to keep readers involved than actual good writing. All in all, I have enjoyed this series very much, and I have given Stabenow the benefit of the doubt when I think she could have stretched herself farther as a writer through fully developing the relationships of her characters, rather than killing them off when she didn't know where else to take her plots. But "Bad Blood"... Well, here is my theory: I think this book was adapted from the Alaskan television series that was supposed to happen, but didn't. It is so unlike the other books that I'm not even sure she wrote it. The sections and chapters are even sectioned like a play, rather than a book: "Act One," etc. Whoever did adapt the script to masquerade as a book could have at least made an attempt to fool the reader, for heaven's sake! More than that, though, missing is that "certain something" that makes Stabenow's books so engaging. It's a competent murder mystery, but that's all it is. The characters do what they do, but the soul of the book is missing. I hope this doesn't herald a trend, because the inescapable impression I have is that Dana Stabenow just didn't care, in this one. I think she really did "phone it in."