The Boy in the Snow – Edie Kiglatuk 2

Author/Guide: M. J. McGrath

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Second in the series which transports you from Ellesmere Island in the Northern Arctic to Alaska. Brrrr

ISBN: 978-0330517768
Genre: Crime, Thriller

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

Edie Kiglatuk is a guide in the Arctic. Now she heads off to Alaska to support her ex on the Iditarod dog sled race which is over 1000 miles long. When she stumbles across a body however, the short break turns into something a lot more serious.

The local police believe that a dark Russian sect The Dark Believers is responsible for the crime, and Edie is told to leave well alone. But she can’t leave it alone as the image of the body haunts.
Edie stays to look into the crime herself and soon the landscape famed for its ice and dark forests is going to get a lot more dangerous and a lot lot darker.

Locations

Reset

Travel Guide

Alaska is a dark and chilling place. This is also the home of the very real and very famous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, an annual long-distance sled dog race run in early March from Anchorage to Nome. Edie is here to support her ex in the race and it’s a thrilling experience to take part –

“The fifteen dogs remaining in the team {..} laboured up the long incline tongues lolling, their muscular bodies taut constellations of will and effort. Nakilivaa! Slow down!”

However the excitement and fast pace is smashed when Edie finds a frozen body in the woods, and chillingly its that of a small baby. Devastated and eager to find out what happened, she comes across one obstacle after another, from the corruption and indifference of the local police and religious extremism.
The darkness deepens as the pages turn…

The story is packed as deep as the Arctic snow with facts and snippets about the way of life in this part of the world, and the conditions faced by the people who live there. As Edie studies a bear she has just spotted –

“Qalunaat, white folk, called them Kermode bears but the native people, the Gitga’at knew them as mooksgm’ol and never hunted them They said the bears were outsider animals, creatures with the power to pass messages across the invisible portals between the living and the dead.”

Alaskan politics is a bleak landscape too – what with the corrupt mayor and his power hungry wife. The mystery is deeply embedded in the community. And this community, life in Alaska is icy, chilling and very complex.