Cold Water Burning

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.

John Straley lives in Sitka, Alaska, with his son and wife, a marine biologist who studies whales. He is the Shamus Award-winning author of The Angels Will Not Care, The Woman Who Married a Bear, The Curious Eat Themselves, The Music of What Happens, and Death and the Language of Happiness.