The Woman Who Married a Bear
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
High drama meets local color as a private investigator works to uncover the motive and identity of a killer in this Shamus Award–winning first Cecil Young investigation set in Sitka, Alaska.
Cecil Younger, local Alaskan investigator, is neither good at his job nor at staying sober. When an old Tlingit woman hires him to discover why her son, a big game guide, was murdered, he takes the case without much conviction that he’ll discover anything the police missed. He really just needs the extra cash. But after someone tries to kill him, Younger finds himself traveling across Alaska to ferret out the truth in the midst of conspiracies, politics, and Tlingit mythology. High drama meets local color as Cecil Younger works to uncover the motive and identity of the killer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
