Cold Water Burning - Hardcover

Straley, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553106430 ISBN 13: 9780553106435

Publisher: Bantam, 2001

Synopsis

The award-winning novels of John Straley are powerful, one-of-a-kind mysteries set in a world of perfect beauty and less-than-perfect lives. In his new novel, Straley plunges us into the wake of a horrific crime that has scarred its survivors, set a community on edge, and brought private investigator Cecil Younger into the eye of a deadly storm.

It could be argued that being a private investigator in the small town of Sitka, Alaska, is one of the worst career decisions a person with a high-school diploma can make. And the fact is, even by his own admission Cecil Younger is not even a good private investigator. Yet for some reason, call it fate, he cannot give it up. As if he needed proof, there was the case of the unsolved murders aboard the Mygirl.

Three years ago someone brutally killed four people on the scow, soaked the deck with gasoline, and set all the evidence ablaze as he escaped in a red tin skiff. Two young men got out with their lives and a third was charged with the slayings. But in a crowded courtroom Cecil Younger helped the accused go free, knowing that the headline-grabbing trial did everything but get at the truth.

Now, the man charged with the Mygirl murders has disappeared and his wife believes someone has taken revenge. As a storm bears down on the Alaskan coast, two people connected with the case die in separate, sudden, and bizarre explosions of gunfire.

Younger is sure that someone is trying to finish the deadly job begun on the Mygirl three years ago. But to find the answers he needs, Younger must leave the fragile shelter of his life -- a life shared with his lover Jane Marie, their infant child, and housemate Toddy.

A wooden sloop called the Naked Horse has left harbor for the wind-lashed sea. And out in the storm, chasing the Naked Horse, Cecil Younger will come face-to-face with everything he thought he knew, with a person he thought he trusted, and with the jagged pieces of a mystery taking a new, horrifying shape in his mind.

About this title

Review

Cecil Younger, the protagonist of John Straley's series of mysteries set in Sitka, Alaska, isn't exactly a slacker, but as PIs go, he doesn't invest his job with a great deal of energy or effort. In Cold Water Burning, his sixth outing, Cecil stumbles with characteristic good nature through his assignment: to find a missing man he himself helped acquit of burning a boat and killing its occupants. The man's vanished, along with $50,000 a tabloid advanced him for his version of how the crime really went down.

A talented stylist whose prose sparkles like the sun on icy tundra, Straley excels at sketching unusually picaresque characters and painting brilliant word portraits of Sitka's beautiful and unforgiving setting. All the elements are in place for a satisfying thriller--the unsolved murders aboard the Mygirl, Cecil's role in helping the accused man go free, and the anger of the victims' survivors, which ultimately places our hero in the murderer's gun sights. But they take second place to Cecil's relationship with his most trusted mentor, George Doggy, and both the plot and the pace--not exactly a breakneck ride to begin with--suffer as a consequence. There's a brilliant scene right out of The Perfect Storm as Cecil heads out on a very large ocean in a very small boat to rescue Toddy, his autistic housemate. Straley manages to stitch the somewhat ragged edges of the plot together convincingly enough, but he may need to light a fire under Cecil if he expects him to continue to carry this series. --Jane Adams

From the Back Cover

Praise for John Straley:

"The voice is so original that it can only belong to John Straley.... Definitely up there with the great ones."
-- Chicago Tribune

"Straley is one of the best prose stylists to emerge from the genre in a long time."
-- San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Straley's prose continues to dazzle.... his word-pictures have a hallucinatory brilliance appropriate...to the eerie beauty of the Alaskan landscape."
-- The Wall Street Journal

"Cecil Younger is one of the most entertaining detectives since [James Lee Burke's] Dave Robicheaux."
-- The Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge

"One of the strongest series since Tony Hillerman set up shop."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"Strong and sobering... With his storyteller's sense of dramatic action [Straley's] in his glory."
-- The New York Times Book Review

"Cecil Younger's creator is a gifted storyteller. Straley's evocation of coastal Alaska is as magical as the aurora borealis.... readers will be delighted."
-- Booklist

"Straley is a great entertainer and poet."
-- Heartland magazine

"Now and then a writer dares to flout the rules and, in so doing, carves out a niche that belongs to him alone. John Straley's novels are like no others."
-- San Diego Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0553106430
• ISBN 13: 9780553106435
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208