Kristine Killdeer

If you liked Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson), you will love Kristine Killdeer, the dark, Swedish-American protagonist of the Kristine Killdeer Saga (4 vols). In The Serpents of Eden (vol. 1), Alaska dramatically awakens as the exotic setting for the fire and ice romance of Kristine Killdeer (wild child of the Far North) and Owen Woodson (bush teacher). The story cross-cuts between their forbidden desire and the eco-war between Big Timber and The People of the Moose, into which the lovers are drawn on opposite sides: Kristine as a logger's daughter, Owen as an eco-activist, sympathetic to the natives' struggle to preserve their ancestral life-ways amidst the depredations of "resource extraction." In this event-filled saga, memorable characters cast long shadows over the violent landscape: Arvid Killdeer, Kristine's pathological step-father; Mike Mallet, the sadistic foreman of Chugiak Lumber Mills; Leland Mobley, the Machiavellian principal of the small wilderness school; Julian Erasmus, its institutional bully; Rusty Standmark, the beleaguered tribal chief of the People of the Moose. Can love survive in this beautiful wilderness of violence and divided loyalties, whose cataclysms compound the cultural fault-lines, whose arctic nights and boreal fires seem to spring from the mystery that is Kristine Killdeer--the lovely predator at the heart of its darkness.