The Red Mitten (2006)

by Sarah Birdsall

This mystery takes place among the scattered community along the shores of fictional Lake Ilmenof involving three childhood friends. Birdsall herself moved from New York with her family to a homestead on Lake Iliamna when she was 8. Her dad, Bob Durr, fished in Bristol Bay many years and has a book below. Birdsall’s mystery and characters grows out of her Iliamna childhood and bush life experience and is well represented from bush pilots to the smell of two-stroke skiffs. My uncle came to Alaska to a teaching job at the small village of Iliamna, and I’ve been up to the lake and its villages with him. Birdsall’s book captures the vastness of the lake and its beautiful surroundings and the somewhat secretive and distant relationship between people there. I’ve read this book a few times just to revel in that setting; it is a great story.