Library Journal Review
Jessie Arnold is back racing across the frozen North with her sled dogs, but she's also in a race against time: a young racer has been abducted, the ransom demand is in, and the police are not to be told. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Alaska's spectacular, dangerous wilderness forms the background to Henry's engaging, if overplotted, sixth novel (after Deadfall). Professional musher Jessie Arnold is in peril, this time on the Yukon Quest, "the toughest dogsled race in the world," which runs over 1000 miles from Whitehorse, Canada, to Fairbanks, Alaska. Early in the race, novice musher Debbie Todd is captured and held for $200,000 ransom. The kidnappers demand that Debbie's frantic stepfather give Jessie the money for delivery during the race, warning them both that Debbie will die if they inform the police. But Jessie secretly notifies her good friend, Inspector Charles Delafosse, before she tackles the race's most demanding leg. In a climactic finish, Jessie almost loses her life when she confronts the criminals on American Summit during a blinding blizzard. Throughout this turmoil, Jessie is also trying to sort out her feelings for her lover, State Trooper Alex Jensen, who's at his father's funeral in Idaho. Henry decorates her novel with glorious evocations of Alaska, believable characters, interesting mushing lore and deft explanations of dogsledding mechanics. But the story suffers from a thin plot that leans on obvious clues and unlikely coincidences. Nonetheless, dog lovers will enjoy it, as will those willing to forgive the faults in construction in favor of some beautiful writing. Agent, Dominick Abel. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
For mystery fans interested in the Alaskan wilderness, outdoor sports, or dogsled racing, Henry's latest will have lots of appeal. And even for readers who don't much care for dogs or sports, this well-crafted, suspense-filled story is still worth reading. Jessie Arnold has run the world-famous Iditarod dogsled race but is a rookie in the demanding Yukon Quest, which begins in Canada's Yukon Territory and extends over 1,000 dangerous miles to the finish line in Fairbanks. But Jessie has plenty of spirit and a fit, well-trained dog team. All of that hardly prepares her, however, for what happens when one of her fellow racers is kidnapped, and Jessie must deliver the ransom, rescue the victim, and capture the bad guys. The story is slow to get started, with the first 100 pages or so devoted to details about dogsled racing, but when the action kicks in, the story hurtles along agreeably to a surprising ending. Recommend this to fans of Nevada Barr. --Emily Melton
Kirkus Review
Seems like Jessie Arnold can't keep racing her beloved sled dogs without running into trouble. Not ordinary trouble like bad weather, red tape, sick dogs, accidents, frostbite, equipment failures, delays while she rescues other competitors, and the other things she expects to go wrong along the thousand-mile Yukon Quest from Whitehorse, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska'but the homicidal kind of trouble that reduces cast members to corpses quicker than temperatures of 50 below. This year's murder of a dog handler is incidental to the main event: the kidnaping of veteran racer Jake Leland's stepdaughter Debbie Todd, a rookie whose first Yukon Quest is even more traumatic than Jessie's. The ransom note Jake gets forbids him to tell anyone about the abduction except for Jessie, and even promises that a second communication will wait till after Jessie gets into the checkpoint at Dawson. Despite the commendable ingenuity of Henry (Deadfall, 1998, etc.), though, in tying the Job-like ordeals of Jessie's race in to the kidnaping plot, the mystery unravels long before the end because Jessie can't stop herself from telling one person after another about Debbie, and because the murder victim is so unimportant and the suspects so interchangeable under those heavy parkas, and because the plot needs a flurry of coincidences to come to an ending. All the humans except Jessie herself finally come across as interlopers in the natural beauty and peril of the landscape.