So Far and Good

September 15, 2021
Just because Sitka, Alaska, private eye Cecil Younger is in prison doesn't mean he can't bobble a new case as completely as any of his old ones. Sentenced to seven years for the crimes he confessed to in Baby's First Felony (2018), Cecil's focused on keeping on the good side of Albert Munro, aka Fourth Street, the powerful fellow prisoner whose communication skills with women (for instance, not calling them all "bitches") he's working to improve in preparation for Street's next parole hearing. Cecil's priorities change when his daughter, Blossom, tells him that her friend Georgianna Paul has taken a DNA test and discovered that her mother, Alaska legislator Ida Paul, isn't her biological mother--and that George's DNA is a match for a kidnapped baby. News quickly leaks out, and acting through Blossom, Cecil instantly recommends attorney Harrison Teller to Ida, but it doesn't help; Ida's promptly arrested for kidnapping. Before she can reply to the charge that she and her husband, Richard Paul, stole the newborn daughter of Thomas and Kristy Thompson and passed George off as their own, Ida's found dead in the prison, an apparent suicide. The court orders George placed with the Thompsons, and that's when things really go off the rails, leading to a series of variously amusing and horrifying complications that will require Cecil to go on a thoroughly unauthorized one-night furlough in order to take matters into his own uncertain hands. The storytelling is lumpy, but how many genre novelists mix as many different kinds of events and reflections as Straley?

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October 4, 2021
Shamus Award winner Straley’s gripping eighth Cecil Younger investigation finds the Sitka, Alaska, PI doing prison time for the desperate measures he took to save the life of his teenage daughter, Blossom, in 2018’s Baby’s First Felony. Blossom, meanwhile, seeks his advice on how to help her friend Georgianna “George” Paul. A DNA test George has taken indicates that her parents, Ida and Richard Paul, aren’t her biological parents, and she’s in fact the victim of a notorious kidnapping years earlier of a native infant. After Ida and Richard are arrested, efforts are made to reunite George with her birth parents, but something isn’t quite right with her new family. Ida’s subsequent prison suicide may have been something more sinister, and there’s a growing sense that the original kidnapping might not have been all that it seemed. Events take a deadly turn when Blossom disappears while trying to help George, forcing Cecil to make use of his new prison connections and, once again, take desperate measures on his own. Memorable characters match the vividly realized Alaskan settings. Readers will eagerly await the next installment. Agent: Kerry D’Agostino, Curtis Brown.

November 1, 2021
Between 1992 and 2001, Straley wrote six novels about Sitka, Alaska, criminal-defense investigator Cecil Younger. He then took a long break from the series, bringing Cecil back in 2018's Baby's First Felony and proving that you can return to a character after a decade and a half, and it's as if you've never been away. In the new Younger novel, the eighth in the series, Cecil is about halfway through a seven-year prison term (he was originally sentenced to 25 years for murder, but his lawyers got the sentence knocked down). He's assisting a fellow inmate who's preparing for his upcoming parole hearing, but the real story here concerns Cecil's daughter, Blossom, who's helping her friend find out who her biological parents are. Turns out the friend's real identity is a major shocker, and soon Blossom's in deep trouble. Can her father help her out of a jam even though he's behind bars? Straley reminds us just why the Younger novels were so popular, and why it's so good to have the man back.

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