The first book in the Liam Campbell series, 1998

My thanks again to my father, Don Stabenow, always my first and most important resource, and who has certainly never ever been quoted verbatim in any of my books, goodness me, no, and to Pati, for the drunk shaman, and to Sifu Marshall V. Clymer, for his years of skill and kindness, and to John Evans of the Dillingham Police Department and Dyanne Inglima Brown of the Alaska State Troopers. They can be the cops on my beat any day.

Liam boarded first and watched the rest of the passengers troop down the aisle. It was a full load, a disparate group that he had already typed and cross-matched with their potential for future crime.

There was the Alaskan Old Fart, short, dark, a grin one part mean to two parts pure evil, who had poacher written all over him. There was the tall man with a shock of white hair and his green-eyed daughter, who would both of them have helped the Old Fart skin out whatever he took whenever he took it, but only so much as they could use in a winter. There was the Moccasin Man, tall, loping, clad in fatigues and beaded buckskin moccasins with matching belt pouch that Liam instantly pegged for growing wholesale quantities of marijuana in his back bedroom, and the Hell's Angel, Moccasin Man's sidekick, barrel-shaped beer belly, black leather boots with a shine on them to match the one reflected by his shaved, bullet-shaped scalp with a meth lab in his spare room. The Flirt, on the other hand, should have been arrested for incitement to riot the second after she'd stepped out in public that morning: she wore a red silk shirt with no bra beneath it and a long skirt that accentuated the deliberate sway of her very nice ass. Moccasin Man had demonstrated an immediate and obvious admiration for that sway, and had been granted the privilege of escorting the Flirt to her seat.