ONE PAW WAS RED

The words had been cut from a newspaper and pasted onto ship's stationery — bright and stark as signboards nailed to the dark green spruce: "Something terrible is going to happen at the Gulsina Roadhouse after the Call of the North docks. Come and stop it, marshal."

A cry for help — or a dare? Where a name should go, two pasted words: Innocent Bystander.

Smyth is no marshal — just an unassuming Fairbanks grocer with a love of detective stories. He reaches the roadhouse a step ahead of the station wagon rolling in from the Call of the Northfor lunch, and joins its passengers: handsome Murray, with two fair-haired cousins vying openly for his attention; the driver, whose grin opens doors and who lingers too long over Angel, the young wife of the aging innkeeper Zenas; and the last three at the table — a busybody aunt, a stylish dark-haired young woman, and a young man easy to overlook.

When they rise to leave and find their station wagon sabotaged. Help is a full day away, likely more, and the weather is closing in. They are all exactly where the letter wanted them.

Through the company runs love — not the tender kind, but love as leverage, the sort that becomes, to the right person, a motive for murder. Only Bearpaw, the Inuit helper, seems untouched, watching all, silent as the spruce. And above them, mounted on the roadhouse wall as long as anyone can remember, hangs the great bearskin.

Smyth doesn't yet know who has been marked, or by whom — only that the ties binding these trapped souls form a kind of map he must read before disaster strikes. Then, next morning, a single paw on that old bearskin turns red — and his time has already run out.

Cozy up to a vintage 1940s whodunit rich with Alaskan atmosphere, closed-circle suspense, tangled hearts, and sly wit — anchored by the unlikeliest sleuth in the Territory.

Readers first followed Smyth in Murder Breaks Trail, Doom in the Midnight Sun, and Murder Wears Mukluks. Now the beloved Alaska Vintage Series reaches its final, frost-bitten chapter — a long-lost treasure by Alaskan author Eunice Mays Boyd, discovered among her hand-typed manuscripts fifty years after her death and brought to readers at last by her goddaughter.

One warning. One sabotaged car. One roadhouse of secrets — and one paw gone red, marking a promise of death that F. Millard Smyth must break before it's kept.