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FAIRBANKS — Private Detective Nik Kane is back for his third go-round. The disgraced former cop and ex-con was last seen with a bullet in his gut and his grown son dead, the price he paid for solving a murder in Alaska’s capitol. Now he’s in the state’s largest city, struggling to recover from his injuries and avoid confronting his son’s death by reopening a twenty-year-old case that was his first assignment after being promoted to detective in the Anchorage Police Department.

The case involved the shooting of a fellow cop, Danny Shirtleff, who was found dead beside his Corvette on a rainy September night in 1985 near Skeleton Lake on the outskirts of Anchorage. Shirtleff had just returned from an undercover drug sting operation on Kodiak Island and had been carrying $20,000 in federal buy money. The cash, not found at the crime scene or anywhere else, was the only apparent motive for his shooting.

Kane and his senior partner, a grizzled tank of a man named Giuseppe DiSanto who went by the name Jackie Dee, had spent a year coming up empty handed in their efforts to crack the case. Their failure had ultimately led the unruly DiSanto to be busted back down to patrol, and had haunted Kane ever since.

This is the scene Mike Doogan, a former Anchorage Daily News columnist and current Alaska legislator, sets in “Skeleton Lake,” the third and best yet in his series of “Nik Kane Alaska Mysteries.”

Doogan’s lead character, Nik Kane, is the ideal protagonist for a detective series. His police career had come to a smashing halt when he was involved in an accidental shooting for which he was imprisoned. He’d taken up private investigative work after his release, but continues to be stalked by his numerous demons. His wife has left him, his daughters are estranged, and his son — with whom he had only recently reestablished a relationship — has been killed in the crossfire of Kane’s most recent case. He’s a dark, brooding, barely recovering alcoholic, and, as we learn in this book, even his childhood was a mess. We certainly can’t have a happy detective out solving murder cases, and Kane is in no imminent danger of achieving that fate.

“Skeleton Lake” works its way through three separate plotlines taking place over three different decades. In the present Kane is recuperating in a convent overseen by his elder sister, a nun. He spends his time reviewing his old case files from the Shirtleff murder and reminiscing with his sister about their difficult upbringing.

Meanwhile, fueled by exhaustion and painkillers, Kane’s mind drifts back into his past, re-living his teenage years in Anchorage in the early 1960s, during which time his drunken father had disappeared, never to be seen again. He also recalls his and Jackie Dee’s fruitless investigation of Shirtleff’s murder during the 1980s.

The book alternates between these three periods in Kane’s life, and while in the end it moves fully into the present and the themes are brought to resolution, Doogan avoids the tactic of finding some cheesy way of pulling them all into one bundle. There are three separate stories here, and each reaches its own, not necessarily conclusive, end.

Despite the disparate storylines and continually shifting timeframes, “Skeleton Lake” holds together better than either of its predecessors in this series. This is largely due to the fact that Doogan has devoted more time here to character development.

Readers of the series know that Kane is a deeply conflicted man, but thanks to the lengthy forays into his past that this book provides, they get a much better grasp on why. Having read all three books, I found myself feeling more sympathetic toward Kane in this volume than I had in the previous ones. He’s is fleshed out far more in these pages, making him seem quite a bit more real.

In addition to Kane, Doogan has also created several memorable supporting characters for this story. The best and most fully developed of these is Kane’s mid-1980s partner Jackie Dee, a fat, obnoxious, never-by-the-book detective who is continually chomping high cholesterol food and cursing everybody in sight. One can’t help but like him.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Mike Doogan book without some clever wordplay and a few inside jokes. One of the things he does here is pepper his story with bit players who share names with famous people. This is obvious in the case of a police chief named William “call me Wild Bill” Hickock (who’s anything but wild) and more subtle with a detective named Harry Callaghan (remove the “g” from the surname and you have the same moniker as the cinematic hero Dirty Harry). But the best use of this device comes when Doogan describes another officer as “a sad sack named Don Young, who wasn’t smart enough to get out of his own way.”

While the first two books in the Nik Kane series were certainly enjoyable, Doogan has taken a big leap forward with this one. He’s digging much deeper into Kane’s character now. Where the earlier volumes did a great job of evoking Alaska and were driven by good plots with plenty of action, “Skeleton Lake” takes a more subdued approach, trading gunshots and fistfights for nuance and personality development. And there are enough loose ends left by the end of this book to give Doogan plenty more to work with in the future. The Nik Kane series shows no signs of running out of steam.

David A. James lives in Fairbanks.