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the boulder perched at the edge of the cliff overlooking the stream. March had come in like the proverbial lion and the snow cover was melting almost as they watched.
    “They could have killed someone, Kate.”
    “Someone did get killed,” she said.
    Jim hated to let any case go, especially murder. “Got any thoughts about the gun?”
    She opened her eyes and looked at him, not without sympathy. “Sure. They probably tossed it off Point Woronzof, let the tides take it out. That’s what I would have done.”
    Nettled, he said, “You’re taking this awfully calmly. You went to school with the guy. Don’t you care?”
    She was silent for a moment. “Those wreckers I told you about?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Sometimes they drowned. Sometimes they got caught, and sometimes they got hanged. Sometimes people off the ships drowned. But most of the wreckers were peasants living way below the poverty line, no jobs to speak of, no homes, no way of feeding their kids. They thought the risk was worth it.”
    He was silenced.
    “Wreck rights,” she said after a while. “We call it salvage rights now, but it was wreck rights then. If it washes up on shore and you find it, it’s yours.”
    “And if it falls off the highway and you find it—”
    “Then that’s yours, too,” she said.
    Mutt came back with a ptarmigan and sat down to lunch. The three of them sat in the sun for a while longer, and then Kate went back to her cabin, and Jim went back to town.

Excerpt
     
If you enjoyed “Wreck Rights,” we think you’ll like
So Sure of Death
. It’s a novel in the popular Liam Campbell series by Dana Stabenow, and it’s now available as an e-book at stabenow.com .
     

So Sure of Death
    “NOW, THERE IS THE SOUND of someone not flying his own plane.”
    “Shut up and breathe.”
    Wyanet Chouinard sank obediently into a modified Horse Stance as the float plane roared overhead. She was a grown woman, the owner and proprietor of her own air taxi service and the mother of a soon-to-be-adopted son. She didn’t have to take orders from anyone, but she would from this one old man.
    The old man was Moses Alakuyak, short, thick through the chest and shoulders, with his Yupik mother’s brown skin and flat cheekbones and hints of his unknown Anglo father in his height, in the high bridge of his nose, the roundness of his eyes, the suppressed curl and color of his hair. Some called him a shaman. Some called him a drunk. On occasion, he was both, and neither.
    This morning he was a teacher of tai chi, a sifu, and he demanded his student’s full attention and submission. He got it, too, the little despot, Wy thought without rancor. He was standing to her left and a step behind. She could feel his eyes on her, checking the level of her hands, the depth of the cup of her palms, the tilt of her chin, the angle behind her bent knees, the straightness of her spine, the focus of her eyes.
    “Lower,” he said. “How’n hell you supposed to strengthen your thigh muscles for the real work if you don’t push them in Horse Stance?”
    She made a silent and anatomically impossible suggestion as to where he could put his Horse Stance, and bent her knees, which after ten minutes were starting to tremble, to a deeper angle. Her center of gravity seemed off, and she swayed back an inch or so. There. She was supposed to feel the balls and heels of her feet rooted to the earth, the crown of her head suspended from a string. Root from below, suspend from above. Her breathing deepened. Her eyelids lowered, her gaze unfocused on the horizon.
    The sneaky little son of a bitch waited until she was completely engrossed in the first position of the Yang style of tai chi chuan before he brought out the big gun. “How long you gonna wait before you talk to Liam again?”
    She couldn’t control the start his words gave her, but she could — and did — bite down on her verbal response. She said nothing, trying to recapture the peace of mind that had been hers