Broken Angels — Russell Heath

She stares at her mother's clumsy lettering on the envelope. Nine years. Nine years since she stepped over her mother's drunken body and into a cold Alaska night running south, lost to her mother forever.

How did she find me? She hesitates, not wanting to open the envelope, knowing the letter inside will drag her home; back into the bleakness of a life with no exit.

Kris Gabriel, twenty-four, Alaska Native, and fierce like a wolverine, returns to Alaska -- to find her mother murdered; shot in the face by the double-barreled blast of a shotgun. Angry her mother is pushed around even in death, guilty she abandoned her in life, Kris only knows to fight. Relentlessly, she tracks a trail of pain, of lost love, of lives ripped apart by the frozen North's unyielding law of survival, never suspecting it's not what her mother would have wanted.

Never suspecting that she has far more at stake than finding her mother's killer.

Broken Angels is fast-paced Alaskan noir filled with richly drawn characters struggling to survive in a hostile country where there are no second chances.