The Woman Who Married a Bear

In Sitka, Alaska, the bizarre death of a big-game hunter years before is investigated by investigator Cecil Younger, who uncovers a many-layered mystery involving the folklore and mythology of the local Tlingit Indians.

A compelling narrator/protagonist and colorful local details propel this commanding mystery, the first of a projected series set in Alaska. Cecil Younger is a bundle of paradoxes: a hard-drinking private eye in Sitka, he writes haiku and lives with the guilt of career failure and the pain born when he wife walked out on him. Younger needs a good case to get his mind off his troubles, and it comes when an old Tlingit woman hires him to find out why her son, big-game guide Louis Victor, was shot to death. She does not believe the mentally unbalanced man convicted of the crime was responsible. Younger takes on the closed case mainly to placate the grieving mother, but after he is the target of potshots, he comes to believe there is a deeper story than the facts suggest. Throwing himself into the case, he travels from Sitka to Juneau to Anchorage to track down and question the victim's wife, grown children, friends and fellow guides. Sustaining the suspense from start to satisfying, unexpected finish, first novelist Straley, a criminal investigator for Alaska's Public Defender Agency, since suspense is sustained thru plot, seems awk to mention them separately has written a book whose unique, fully fleshed-out characters readers will be eager to see again.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Alaska is the star of this fresh debut mystery (the first in a series), though poetic, alcoholic, lovelorn, nondriving (he depends on taxis, hitchhiking, and obliging friends) Cecil Younger plays a strong supporting role. Younger's the improbable p.i. who's hired from a nursing home to find out who really killed Tlingit hunting-guide Louis Victor--his mother is convinced it wasn't his hired hand Alvin Hawkes, now doing a long stretch for the murder. And Younger, who takes her money planning to feed her a comforting lie, changes his mind when he notices some telltale marks on the face of the late De De Robins--an apparent suicide days before she was to testify about a fight between Victor and Hawkes. Mostly a series of interviews with the suspects, but sensitive, in-your-face Younger makes each one into a stylish riff, and the Alaska background is refreshingly tangy. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Cecil Younger, a private investigator of sorts in Sitka, Alaska, has many enemies besides the alcohol he so assiduously consumes. One of them tries to kill him when he asks questions about the murder of an Indian--even though the convicted killer sits in prison. Cecil's quest connects him with a cross-section of frontier inhabitants: Indians, Eskimos, hunters, drunkards, even an estranged lover. Straley's evocative prose conjures up both natural wonder and human tawdriness without slackening the insistent suspense. A promising debut.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.