Guest Post: Deep Freeze Thrillers

A break from increasingly scarce Wendy blathering today - with a guest post from Bat Cave Friend, TBR Challenge Participant, and all around good egg, Janet W!  Since the start of the new year I've been glomming on to suspense reads and Janet's dynamite post is sure to send a chill (the good kind!) into the heart of suspense fans everywhere.  Enjoy!

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What’s the appeal of wintery thrillers set in the interior of Alaska or Canada’s Yukon Territory? Consider that the temperature in February ranges between an average high of 8°F and a low of -13°F. That’s bone-chilling cold. During the winter solstice, there are less than four hours of daylight per day. Poets, novelists, and artists—often depicting the Aurora Borealis—have shaped how we envision winter in the vast and mostly unpopulated far north. The crux of Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire,” is the eternal conflict of man against nature. In London’s frozen Yukon, a vulnerable man is someone who doesn’t respect the power of nature. 

But all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all--made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

Three novels—Nora Roberts’s Northern Lights, Kelley Armstrong’s A Stranger in Town, and Dark Night by Paige Shelton—illustrate why the North makes a hospitable, albeit frigid, locale for murder. 

Northern Lights strikes some universal themes. The first, that moving north of the Lower 48 is often an escape and refuge from painful events. Baltimore cop Nate Burke accepts a job as police chief of Lunacy Alaska. In his rearview mirror is a dead partner and a divorce: he can’t get far enough away to start again. To escape being labeled a cheechako (a term that used to describe “a person newly arrived in the mining districts of Alaska or northwestern Canada” and now defines newcomers to Alaska and the Yukon), you must embrace the great outdoors. Nate decides to take up snowshoeing. The alternative is holing up for the winter with an ample supply of whiskey and firewood. Another theme is that loners like being alone and are unfazed by winter’s vicissitudes. There’s a tension between escaping the past and embracing a new community in a northern setting. Nora Roberts, an oft underrated author, addresses this very effectively in the person of Nate Burke, a new lawman who uncovers a decades-dead frozen body early in his tenure. His new girlfriend, bush pilot Meg, is the daughter of the dead man. Her approach to justice has a tinge of the Wild West. 

I believe in payback. For the little things, for the big ones. For everything in between. Letting people screw you over is just lazy and uncreative.

The theme of escaping one’s past is also addressed in Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series. Rockton, a fictional town near Dawson City, Yukon Territory, is “a haven for those running from their pasts.” 

Trouble always seems to find Detective Casey Duncan and her boyfriend and boss Sheriff Eric Dalton, particularly when they’re off-piste, looking for some R&R in the wilderness surrounding Rockton.

Rockton is a closed community, completely hidden from scrutiny. To escape traditional retribution, criminals pay inordinately large sums of money and serve their “sentence” in relative comfort, climate extremes notwithstanding. The town of Rockton is analogous to an open prison except, like the British TV series The Prisoner, only the folks who keep the lights on and the trains running are allowed to leave (to get supplies and access the internet). The final Rockton book, The Deepest of Secrets, will be published in February 2022. 

Dark Night, the third of Paige Shelton’s Alaska Wild mysteries, opens as winter is closing in. For Beth Rivers, who writes popular thrillers under the name Elizabeth Fairchild, the allure of the fictional town of Benedict is its remoteness. Folks in Benedict (a fictional town) respect one another’s privacy. Thin Ice was the first in Paige Shelton’s Alaska Wild mystery series. Beth arrives in two-person prop plane, on the run after escaping from a stalker who kidnapped her. She’s carved out a good life: Beth has a job, writing the weekly “one-sheet newspaper, the Petition,” a room “at the Benedict House, a halfway house for female felons,” and friends and acquaintances (like her almost boyfriend Tex). Only the police chief Gril Samuels knows her back-story, or so Beth supposes. Beth has a talent for detection. When a local is murdered outside the popular watering-hole, she can’t resist the allure of solving the puzzle. Was he murdered by a Benedict citizen or a newcomer? If the murderer is on the run, where do they hide, especially if they’re from the lower forty-eight? Most outsiders don’t have the wherewithal to prepare adequately for the extreme conditions. 

To enjoy a mystery set in Alaska or the Yukon, you don’t have to prepare for frigid temperatures and almost 24/7 darkness. You can curl up with a hot chocolate in front of a fire while you enjoy these stories. Unlike the hero of Robert Service’s famous poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” you may shiver in fear but you won’t be cold!