Nathan Active Mystery Books

The first Nathan Active mystery Born to a poor Inupiat girl in Chukchi, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle, State Trooper Nathan Active was adopted and raised by a white family in Anchorage. Now, an unwelcome job reassignment has returned him to the stark, beautiful landscape of poverty-stricken Chukchi. Two suspicious suicides in the span of a week and rumors of trouble in the village and at the local copper mine lead Active to believe there is a killer at large. As a nalauqmiiyaaq , or someone regarded by the community as “halfwhite,” he must fight for every clue before the killer strikes again.

“In a robust sequel to White Sky, Black Ice , this Alaska state trooper is still burdened by his urban upbringing and his aversion to ice and snow . . . Active maintains his awe of the vast Alaskan tundra, a forbidding region that Jones renders in all its bone-chilling beauty.” — The New York Times Book Review State Trooper Nathan Active was born in the Inupiat village of Chukchi, where he is now stationed, but he was adopted and raised in Anchorage. Now he must investigate the murder of a tribal leader who was stabbed to death with an antique harpoon that was recently returned to the community under the Indian Graves Act.

Blizzards, tundra, Eskimos, bush pilots, and bingo-loving grandmas enliven this literate ethnic mystery starring Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active, who has been assigned to the remote Arctic town of Chukchi. Though born an Inupiat Eskimo, Active was raised in Anchorage by white parents and has little knowledge of his native culture. During the long months he has spent in Chukchi, he has rallied against the icy weather and struggled to understand his two cultural identities, but he realizes how deeply he has been settling into the rhythms of community life when Grace Palmer, a local beauty queen, goes missing. The state trooper mounts a search that ultimately leads him halfway across Alaska—and gives him plenty of time to discover he is in love with Grace. Closing in on the answers, however, he discovers evidence that points to an agonizing situation: she is either dead, or she is a cold-blooded killer.

The fourth Nathan Active mystery Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active must figure out what connects a dead hunter on a remote Arctic lake with a year-old fatal plane crash in the Brooks Range and an arson at the Chukchi Recreation Center. That fire killed eight people, including the police chief and the town’s basketball star. Active’s investigation leads him to a lucrative polar-bear poaching operation and a brother and sister with an intense bond from a village famous for twins, polar bears, and schizophrenia.

Nathan Active, the top cop in a swath of the Alaskan tundra that is larger than15 U.S. states, has a new mystery to unravel after a dog musher is killed by a snowmobile. When the case is connected with Alaska’s gorgeous female governor, Active is swept into the bizarre family affairs and outsized political ambitions of the most dangerous woman he has ever met.  Now the counter-moves that have been put into place by the governor threaten the lives of both his beloved Grace Palmer and her daughter, Nita. With his career on the line, Active has to outwit the governor and save the people he cares for most before time runs out.

Police Chief Nathan Active investigates a plane crash out in Alaska’s Big Empty—and what he finds there casts suspicion of murder on several locals in his small town of Chukchi. Evie Kavoonah, a young mother-to-be, and her fiancé, Dr. Todd Brenner, are on a flight over the Brooks Range when their bush plane runs out of gas and hits a ridge, instantly killing them both. Chukchi police chief Nathan Active doubts he’ll find anything amiss when his close friend, Cowboy Decker, asks him to look into the possibility of foul play. Evie was like a daughter to Cowboy, who trained her to fly, and he insists there’s no way his protégée made a fatal mistake that day. Nathan reluctantly plays along and discovers that Cowboy’s instincts are correct—the malfunction that led to the crash was carefully planned, and several people in the village have motives for targeting the pair. Meanwhile, Nathan’s wife, Gracie, is pregnant, but so scarred by memories of domestic abuse that she isn’t sure she should have the baby. Nathan must support her and their adopted daughter, Nita, while managing an increasingly complex and dangerous murder case.

A dismembered corpse hidden in an ancient Eskimo ice cellar. A tireless cop. An elderly witness too demented to lead him to the body. What now? "Delivers a complex investigation and plenty of twists.”-- Anchorage Daily News With the help of an Alaska Native grandmother suffering from dementia, Chukchi police chief Nathan Active hunts down the killer who hid a woman’s expertly dismembered body in the ice cellar of an abandoned Inupiat fish camp. The investigation pulls Active into a dark tangle of love and jealousy, even as he struggles with the PTSD that has haunted him since being wounded in a shootout in an earlier case. “If you're a reader, this is one of life's pleasures.”-- Amazon reviewer “An enchanting series”--People Magazine