Born and raised in Alaska, reporter Kyle Hopkins had a beautiful childhood, learning indigenous languages, catching salmon with his bare hands, and racing to toss trash bags from the family pickup truck before impatient black bears could climb aboard and grab a free meal. But when he returned as a journalist, covering crime and law enforcement for the Anchorage Daily News, he uncovered the darker side of his home state-a place where criminals hide from the law, convicted felons serve as officers, and a third of villages have no police of any kind.
In THE LAST FRONTIER, Hopkins travels to Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States, where the body of Inupiaq Eskimo Eliza Simmonds was found, half-naked and frozen. In most cities and states, a major investigation would follow. Media coverage. Outrage. Maybe a manhunt and arrest. But justice is hard to find in the most remote corner of the last American frontier. Sometimes it never arrives.
In the tradition of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by David Grann, I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK and SHE SAID, THE LAST FRONTIER is a riveting true crime story that introduces us to a land that is foreign to all but a few. In 2020, Kyle won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of this topic in a Lawless series, which drew millions of readers to ProPublica and prompted the US Department of Justice to declare the lack of certified police in rural Alaska villages to be a national emergency.
