From the wild and wonderful mind of Shamus Award–winning author John Straley comes a poetic masterpiece that explores the ugly truths of the prison industrial complex, the crumbling state of humanity, the role memory plays in the formation of the self, and much more. It's been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends histime trying to forget about the past. Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored—he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden and demand to know where it is. The clock is ticking, and Gloomy knows he needs to find the missing warhead fast, or his...

An offbeat, often hilarious crime novel set in the sleepy Alaskan town of Cold Storage from the Shamus Award winning author of the Cecil Younger series. Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you're zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the town is withering. Clive "The Milkman" McCahon returns to his tiny Alaska hometown after a seven-year jail stint for dealing coke. He has a lot to make up to his younger brother, Miles, who has dutifully been taking care of their ailing mother. But Clive doesn't realize the trouble he's bringing home. His vengeful old business partner is hot on his heels, a stick-in-the-mud State Trooper is dying to bust Clive...

Rattled by the gruesome accidental death of a coworker, Slip Wilson quits his job at a logging camp, and decides to make a clean start in Seattle. But along the way, he rescues a woman and her young niece from their car in the ditch, and his life takes a hard turn. The woman, Ellie Hobbes, is an archist with big dreams. But first, she has to take care of that pesky dead body in the trunk of her car...From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. In this gripping tale of survival, betrayal and murder set in the Pacific Northwest in 1935 from Straley (Cold Water Burning), Slip Wilson is just trying to find work, food and a little justice when he hooks up with a bottle-blonde, Ellie Hobbes, who drags him into her edgy, ragtag life. At the last minute, Ellie, a notorious red union organizer who faces mounting problems with antiunion forces, and her young niece hop aboard the same rickety boat Slip is escaping on that's traveling from Seattle to Juneau. The odd trio barely catches a breath as weather, hunger, a Seattle homicide detective and a revenge-seeking gang of thugs hound them all the way up the Inside Passage. Ellie isn't big on explanations, so Slip isn't sure until nearly the end of their journey if she's a heroine or a scoundrel. Straley's beautifully understated narrative, vivid sense of place and unapologetic, unadorned characters make this a riveting, unpredictable ride. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review Straley, author of the Cecil Younger series, starring a contemporary Alaskan private investigator, turns here to Pacific Northwest history, with a rich tale of labor strife in the 1930s. After quitting his logging job, Slip Wilson sets off for Seattle, hitching a ride with a bleached blond in a big car. Trouble? Of course, especially given the body in the car’s trunk. Soon enough, there’s another body, and Slip, Ellie (the blond), her niece, and a yellow bird are on the lam, sailing a dory up Puget Sound’s Inside Passage, from Seattle to Alaska. What follows is part mystery and part action-adventure tale, as the neophyte sailors battle weather, tides, and unfriendly locals, all the while pursued by a determined Seattle cop on his own kind of lam from a troubled life. Straley hits all the right notes here: vividly detailed scenes evoking the clash between emerging trade unions and more radical advocates of revolution, as well as almost Dickensian vignettes of the working conditions in the canneries and on the waterfronts of the Northwest, meld perfectly with a Jack London–like, man-versus-nature story in which two adults, one child, and one bird, huddled together in a very small boat, attempt to stay afloat and move ever northward. Labor fiction only works if the characters don’t come across as stick figures, singing the union-label song on cue, and Straley nails that, too. Ellie spouts the party line, but she’d rather be Amelia Earhart, and Slip is uncertain about almost everything. If you want to read one novel about the Northwest in the grip of labor unrest, read this one. --Bill Ott

Trapped on an Alaskan cruise line, P.I. Cecil Younger must expose a killer—and fast—or he may just find himself sleeping with the fishes.Cecil Younger never thought it would come to this: running surveillance on a chicken coopthat's being raided by a fowl thief. But things have not exactly been breaking right lately forthe Alaskan P.I. The logical thing to do? Take a vacation, of course.Well, it's not exactly a vacation. Cecil has been paid to investigate a doctor aboard a cruiseship up the Alaskan coast following some complaints from his patients . . . that is, thepatients who are still alive to complain. Worst of all, someone is leaving evidence pointingan accusing finger at Cecil! By the time the S.S. Westward makes landfall, Cecil will bewishing he was back guarding chickens.

“Highly refreshing setting, a great cast of characters and an intriguing plot.”—The Bloomsbury Review“Atmospheric.”—The New York Times Book Review“Flashes of the dark poetry of Ross MacDonald.”—Chicago Tribune“A rich stew of deception and menace.”—Anchorage Daily News“Outstanding . . . satisfies on all levels.”—The Kansas City StarSitka, Alaska, is a subarctic port surrounded by snow-dusted mountains. In addition to honest work, there is a lot of alcohol consumed and other people’s money appropriated. Bars are loud, fights are mean. Rowdy youths party in the ancient Russian cemeteries, sitting on overturned gravestones. Sitka is hardly straight-laced, but murder is uncommon enough to be widely noted—like the Indian big-game guide killed by an ex-miner obeying voices from the earth’s center. The victim’s mother, a Tlingit Indian, summons to her nursing home a local investigator named Cecil Younger. The case is old and ostensibly solved. She wants him to investigate anyway. What he unearths is a virtual fairytale contrived to hide a primal conspiracy.Set against the modern Alaskan frontier and the surviving pantheism of its indigenous population, The Woman Who Married a Bear is a brooding and exotic novel that touches on mysteries far beyond the conventional.John Straley, a criminal investigator for the state of Alaska, lives in Sitka with his son and wife, a marine biologist who studies whales. He is the Shamus Award-winning author of The Curious Eat Themselves and The Music of What Happens.State politics, family feuds, and Native American mythology all figure in the murder of Louis Victor, prominent Alaskan businessman and big-game hunter. But only a hard-drinking private eye named Cecil Younger can solve the crime and lay old ghosts to rest in this atmospheric and engrossing novel set in the Alaskan frontier.

After years on the job as a private investigator in Sitka, Alaska, Cecil Younger doesn't claim to have learned much about humanity as a whole, but he does know this: truth is a slippery thing. When the wife of a former client asks Cecil to find her husband, Cecil agrees. After all, helping to get Richard exonerated during a tragic murder trial three years ago was one of the biggest successes of Cecil's career. But why, if Richard's name was cleared, is he MIA now? Patricia, Richard's steadfast wife, has one guess: someone is after him. It's no secret that Richard has a long list of enemies, not least of which are the family members of the dead. But things soon get complicated when Patricia is killed, sending Cecil on a desperate trip to sea to chase down the twisted truth.