Kodiak Island

Ethan McLaren, emotionally bankrupt and financially strapped, returns home to Kodiak Island hoping to quietly recover from the personally traumatizing events of his past three years in southern California. Instead he finds himself drawn into the murder of a minister he met on the ferry crossing from Homer when seventy-three year old, former island madam, Mz. Martha Marie, dragoons him into investigating.

The VISTA Alaska Letters

I arrived in Alaska in July 1969, accompanied by my wife Suzie, as a VISTA Volunteer. I had requested assignment to an “Eskimo village, in the Interior, with rivers, mountains and forests.” As it turned that such a place actually existed, Little Russian Mission, on the middle Kuskokwim River, 300 air miles west of Anchorage. Duly warned that I would have to build my own cabin as no housing existed, I blithely flew off to the most educational year of my life.

A Teacher on the Yukon

In 1969 I fulfilled a childhood dream and moved to Alaska. The Federal government was my travel agent, having accepted my application to become a VISTA Volunteer, an application which I had stamped "Alaska Only!" My years in Alaska changed me. The sometimes tragic experiences of the following years also had their effects, as did other occurrences, both humorous and instructive. I have been blessed to have lived a full, demanding, and complicated life.