Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska

The stunning true story of a double homicide in the vibrant native Alaskan Iñupiat community at the arctic edge of the United States--written by the public defender at its center.

"[A]n engrossing blend of memoir, travelogue, and courtroom drama about a double murder in the wilds of Alaska . . . The account culminates with courtroom fireworks, but it works equally well as a more modest fish out of water narrative. Readers will be rapt." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Rebecca Wright is a defense attorney living in the Lower 48 when she suddenly finds herself a widow and an empty nester. In need of a radical change, she accepts a public defender position in Utqiagvik on Alaska's North Slope, an oil-rich area the size of Wyoming where the Iñupiat community holds great cultural, political, and economic power. Though she'll always be a tanik--an outsider--she works hard to gain the trust and friendship of the folks who call this singular place home.

When two well-known sisters, Bernice and Wanda Ipalook, are found murdered, Wright is tasked with representing Amos Lane, a drifter on the short-list of murder suspects. Criminal charges are looming. But this is summer in northern Alaska, the season of the midnight sun, when twenty-four-hour sunlight makes it difficult for witnesses to confirm the time--or even the day--they last saw the sisters, Amos, or anyone else. Wright must navigate an unreliable client, a prosecution willing to entrap her to get a conviction, a budding romance, and a community that believes Amos might deserve a different form of justice from what the tanik legal system can provide.

Weaving a detailed portrait of Utqiagvik alongside Wright's complex self-portrait of an outsider in an isolated community, Sisters of the Midnight Sun is a riveting true account that brings to vivid life a land at the edge of the habitable world.

REBECCA WRIGHT STEVENS is a retired public defender with a double major in English and Spanish from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and a Juris Doctor degree from Memphis State.