Death and the Language of Happiness
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
P.I. Cecil Younger returns for another “thoroughly enjoyable and slightly wacko” mystery as he connects the dots between a modern-day murder and an Armistice Day tragedy (Boston Globe).
In the Alaskan town of Sitka, the living is tough and the crimes are aplenty—and plenty personal.
When 97-year-old William Flynn is accused of killing his neighbor, Angela Ramirez, he turns to private investigator Cecil Younger with an odd—and, frankly, rather incriminating—request. He wants Cecil to track down a man he believes witnessed Ramirez’s murder: her estranged husband, Simon Delaney. The only problem? Flynn doesn’t just want Cecil to find Delaney. He wants him to kill the man. Cecil knows that kind of thing would be bad for business, but he takes the job, hoping he can both convince Flynn to call off the manhunt and discover what really happened to his neighbor. But the old man isn’t making the job easy. He keeps confusing two different crimes: Angela Ramirez’s recent murder and an 80-year-old tragedy in which four American Legionnaires were killed during an Armistice Day Parade.
Cecil struggles to sort through the old man’s befuddled memories and dives into the search for Delaney, which takes him on a journey through Alaska history and all over the Pacific Northwest, from the Aleutian Islands to Centralia, Washington.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alaska's splendor and isolation are beautifully evoked in Straley's features starring down-at-the-heels PI Cecil Younger (The Music of What Happens, 1996). But like Cecil, who can't quite get his life together, this plot lacks coherence. Angela Ramirez, a local woman and alcoholic mother of two youngsters, is shot to death in a hotel room. The police find the murder gun in the room of 97-year old former labor agitator William Flynn, who claims he's innocent. Flynn hires Cecil to find Angela's husband, Simon Delaney, a union organizer who had recently decamped, and who, the old man insists, knows about Angela's murder and earlier deaths. Members of Cecil's entourage make their expected appearances: his iconoclast lawyer, Dickie Stein; his loving girlfriend, Jane Marie; and his autistic housemate, Todd. The case winds back to the Centralia Massacre of 1919, when a gunfight broke out between American Legion marchers and Industrial Workers of the World members during an Armistice Day parade in Centralia, Washington. Several men died and two Wobblies vanished. In the process of finding Angela's murderer, Cecil also discovers what happened to the missing Wobblies nearly 80 years before. The scenery and well-integrated historical detail provide a welcome dimension to the often confusing, unevenly developed plot.
