Get The BookBrowse Anthology, our 880 page collection of our past decade of Best of Year reviews, now available in hardcover!

BookBrowse Reviews A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow

A Deeper Sleep

A Kate Shugak Novel

by Dana Stabenow
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • First Published:
  • Jan 9, 2007, 272 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jan 2008, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


Edgar Award–winning author and New York Times bestselling thriller writer, delivers a gripping page-turner set in Alaska
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

A Deeper Sleep is the fifteen volume in the Kate Shugak series, so the series is likely to be familiar to many readers at this point. However, the nature of series such as this is that unless the author becomes a seriously heavy-weight household name there are always far more people who have yet to discover her than already know her; and the absence of such a prolific and well-thought of author from BookBrowse's lists was something that needed to be rectified!

The fifteenth installment has been a surprisingly long time coming - after turning out at least one book a year between 1992 and 2004, Stabenow took a 2 year hiatus to work on her first standalone novel, Blindfold Game (2006), a rip-roaring sea-going adventure/political thriller, which launched her on to the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. A second stand-alone novel is due in February 2008.

Like all of the Kate Shugak novels, and in fact, like all of Stabenow's books, A Deeper Sleep is set in Alaska, a place she knows extremely well having been born and brought up on a 75-foot fish tender working in the Gulf of Alaska by her single-mother, only moving to shore in 8th grade. As you know, Alaska is a very big place, about 1/5 the size of the entire continental United States with more coastline than the entire continental USA, and Kate Shugak has covered plenty of it through the series as you'll see from this map.  However, this time, the action takes place in Niniltna, close to Kate's home.

Kate, an Aleut*, lives on a 160-acre homestead in a fictitious national Park in Alaska. Her roommate is a half-wolf, half-husky dog named Mutt. Her nearest neighbors are a bull moose and a grizzly sow. Farther off are dog mushers, miners, hunters, trappers, fishermen, bush pilots, pipeline workers, Park rats and Park rangers, other Aleuts, Athabascans, a few Tlingits and the residents of the fictional village of Niniltna, perched on the edge of the Kanuyaq River**, a 600-mile long, salmon-rich tributary that winds through the Park to Prince William Sound. From what we can gather this places Kate's home somewhere between Cordova and Tok close to the Bay of Alaska, not all that far, relatively speaking, from Soldovia, where Stabenow lived for part of her childhood.

All the elements that have made this series so popular are present in force in this latest volume, most vividly the Alaskan environment and the strong female protagonist who has seen considerable growth since the early books, both as a woman and as a private investigator. As Publishers Weekly (in their starred review) put it "there is rough humor, a rich heritage of the community necessary for survival, and at the same time a remarkable tolerance for the many idiosyncrasies of those attracted to the harsh realities of Alaskan life. Kate Shugak is becoming a leader among her people and is already a leader in the sorority of women detectives."

If you enjoy books by the likes of Nevada Barr but have yet to experience Dana Stabenow's writing, pick up a copy of A Deeper Sleep sometime soon, or look out for books from earlier in the series which will undoubtedly be widely available in new and used bookstores (see the sidebar for a bibliography).

*The Aleut are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, a chain of more than 300 small volcanic islands, with 57 active volcanoes, that form an arc westward from the Alaska Peninsula which are mostly connected together by a ferry system known as The Alaska Marine Highway. Most of the archipelago is in Alaska, but a few of the most western islands are part of Russia. The Aleutian Islands are both the westernmost part of the United States and also, technically speaking, the easternmost (a feat achieved because they cross longitude 180°. The Prime Meridian/0° is measured from Greenwich in London; thus any point that lies exactly on the 180th meridian is neither east nor west, but step a foot on either side and you are either at the most westerly point on the map or the most easterly!).

**The Kanuyaq River does not appear on maps. However, the Copper River does, and appears to match the location of Stabenow's Kanuyaq. Added to which kanuyaq is the Aleutian word for copper!

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2007, and has been updated for the January 2008 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked A Deeper Sleep, try these:

We have 5 read-alikes for A Deeper Sleep, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Dana Stabenow
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Devil Finds Work
    by James Baldwin
    A book-length essay on racism in American films, by "the best essayist in this country" (The New York Times Book Review).
  • Book Jacket
    The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris
    by Evie Woods
    From the million-copy bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop.
  • Book Jacket
    Real Americans
    by Rachel Khong
    From the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel exploring family, identity, and the shaping of destiny.
  • Book Jacket
    The River Knows Your Name
    by Kelly Mustian
    A haunting Southern novel about memory and love, from the author of The Girls in the Stilt House.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Seven O'Clock Club
    by Amelia Ireland

    Four strangers join an experimental treatment to heal broken hearts in Amelia Ireland's heartfelt debut novel.

  • Book Jacket

    Happy Land
    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

    From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.

  • Book Jacket

    One Death at a Time
    by Abbi Waxman

    A cranky ex-actress and her Gen Z sobriety sponsor team up to solve a murder that could send her back to prison in this dazzling mystery.

  • Book Jacket

    The Fairbanks Four
    by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

    One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

Who Said...

If every country had to write a book about elephants...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J of A T, M of N

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.