Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel

✍ Scribed by Mike Doogan

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.;Berkley Books
• Year: 2005;2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 218 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Meet Nik Kane, the charming star of a new series by *Anchorage Daily News* columnist Doogan. Kane, a 55-year-old ex-cop who's also an ex-con, not to mention an ex-husband, heads to the Alaskan interior to do some detective work for a remote religious community called Rejoice. One of Rejoice's leaders, Thomas Wright, has hired Kane to track down his teenage daughter, Faith. Maybe Faith ran away, or maybe she was abducted. Kaneonly periodically distracted from his detecting by his attraction to a woman he meets at Rejoicequickly learns that Faith wasn't representative of her conservative religious community. A budding feminist with Ivy League ambitions, she also had a sideline income, $500 a week, deposited in a pseudonymous bank account. While Doogan telegraphs the solution to the riddle of Faith's disappearance, engaging, lucid prose more than compensates. *(Aug.)*
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A white-knuckle flight in a bush plane over the Alaskan wilderness jump-starts this debut novel, establishing both the unforgiving setting and the desperate resolve of the main character. Nik Kane spent 25 years with the Anchorage police, 15 as a detective. He has just been released from a 7-year prison term resulting from a false conviction and is on his own, adrift from the police and from his wife. Kane, forced into private investigation, is headed for Rejoice, a fundamentalist Christian community in the harsh, high desert of the interior. One of the daughters of the Elders, an 18-year-old girl named Faith, has gone missing; no one knows if she has simply broken free from the restrictive life at Rejoice or has met with foul play. This is a richly textured novel on several counts. Kane is achingly well delineated; his struggle to adjust to a much bigger, louder, more confusing world after the confines of prison--and to try to find meaning in a life stripped bare of supports--is gripping. All the exigencies of struggling through an Alaskan winter ring true (Doogan has long been a columnist for the *Anchorage Daily News*), and the portrayal of a religious community that holds both secrets and dangers is fascinating. A top-notch start to a projected mystery series. *Connie Fletcher*
*Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved*

✦ Subjects

Mystery