John Straley

Straley loves Alaska's waters, mountains, birds, bears, and trees and writes as though he in worship of them. His people are not as perfect as his eagles, especially in the way-outback, fly-in villages, so the characters are all on the edge of humanity, fighting capital-"P" Progress by drinking, carousing, taking saunas, fishing, and fighting. The author says he wanted to make a screwball comedy. The book is screwball, but the comedy is mixed with a compassion that makes the characters warm, show more even the would-be killers. The book does not march through a plot, but dallies with cinema-loving drug dealers, returning veterans--both of war and prison, the nicest guy in the world running a clinic,
and a musical wannabe worshiper of the Dali Lama. An interesting read, wacky, and slightly grey--not close to noir. You can chew through it slowly--it's no page turner. show less

Delphine is dying of cancer, but she is tired of simply waiting for the disease to end her time on this earth, surviving in a small hotel opposite the hospital where she undergoes chemotherapy. So when an old acquaintance asks for her help in ending a baby-trafficking scheme, Delphine puts on her dead husband's old private investigator hat, slings a leg over a motorcycle, and heads to eastern Washington State to find the man who has stolen babies.

Dephine is a marine biologist who was show more particularly interested in sperm whales, a species about which humans know relatively little. The mystery is therefore interleaved with lessons about sperm whales, much as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick provided us with reams of information about whales and whaling in Moby-Dick. These lessons somehow give the narrative a sort of dreamy feeling, much like we suspect Delphine is experiencing as she pursues her quest with ever-greater difficulty as her body betrays her. The mystery is still sharp and violent, but also satisfying.

This is the first Straley I've read, and I can see I've been missing something special. I'll be seeking out his other books. show less

Most thrillers involving the imminent detonation of a nuclear warhead are driven by a ticking-clock urgency. Since John Straley likes to break the rules, he dismantles the ticking clock in the prologue, as we’re introduced to the mouse that saved the world. She’s found something strange and tasty In a dump outside Cold Storage, Alaska, but as she burrows around she comes across a strange creature with a single blinking eye. What exactly this means, we don’t yet know, but in the opening show more chapter we learn the mouse has died – a circumstance that’s sad for her, but “not for the human beings in this story, most of whom experienced life as a kind of hallucination, unstuck from traditional time as a result of being kept in cages, where nothing happened according to their own will.”

Welcome to the Ted Stevens High Security Federal Penitentiary, a high-tech mechanical maze where prisoners are controlled remotely and often drugged, and one of its inhabitants, a man called Gloomy Knob, who is incarcerated for kidnapping his mother and killing his sister. He feels bad about it, so doesn’t resent being locked up in a high-tech prison for life, even though he can’t clearly remember his crimes. In fact, he can’t remember much of anything. He just wants a prison job that takes him outdoors to do manual labor at a neighboring construction site where a new women’s prison is going up. Prison labor – including the human work that undergirds computer systems - has become profitable in post-war America since the war with North Korea.

America won, of course, but not until after North Korea fired a burst of nuclear warheads that didn’t detonate but set off a global rush to find the missing nukes scattered across Alaska. One day as Gloomy tends a trash fire, he’s rescued – or kidnapped, depending on your perspective – by a couple who are convinced he knows where one of the missiles is, the one that’s about to detonate under Cold Storage. He doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but being yanked out of his numbed routine has caused some memories (or are they hallucinations?) to surface.

It can be confusing to be set down in this world where enhanced interrogation techniques involve mind games and memory-altering drugs, pieces of the nation’s history have been recycled (there’s a new Ghost Dance Movement being suppressed by the authorities, for instance) and characters walk in and out of the pages without explaining themselves. (If you think your confusion comes from not having read Straley’s previous novel, COLD STORAGE, don’t worry; it probably wouldn’t help. The hallucinatory narrative style matches our confused era.) Paralleling Gloomy’s adventures, we learn about his mother Nix and his dying father Clive who own a bar in Cold Storage, and eventually we learn what actually happened when Gloomy’s sister was killed. But along the way it’s a jumbled collage of memories, and for Gloomy it’s never clear which are real and which are drug-induced hallucinations – and neither are we. But the reader willing to go along with the unconventional narration will be rewarded by sharp commentary on our times and equal parts poetry and offbeat humor.

As for nuclear annihilation, don’t worry: the mouse has saved us from our human stupidity. show less

Cecil Younger is in court and in trouble. He's an investigator for the public defender in Sitka, Alaska and an alcoholic who has sworn off the booze long enough to have a loving marriage to a marine biologist, provide a home to an autistic man who was once his legal ward, and raise a beloved daughter who, as Younger explains to the court, has been lost to her cell phone. This is the beginning of his allocution, a statement made by a defendant before sentencing. And a most engrossing show more allocation it is, though longer than usual and a little hard to explain. It begins, as he tells the judge, in the fall, as the rain never stops falling and people are irritable, "during the period of the jokes and well before the deaths and mayhem."

That's not entirely truthful. The jokes keep coming, along with the mayhem and murder. It begins as Cecil meets with a client who wants to "seek employment with the city" – in other words, become a snitch. Since the client is pretty dim, as many of them are, Cecil makes sure to give him a copy of "Baby's First Felony," an illustrated self-help book with useful advice such as "don't wear the tennis shoes you stole to court when the guy you stole them from will be there to testify and his name is still written inside of them." Though the clientele Cecil works with is not very sophisticated, the method a criminal crew is using to smuggle drugs into the state is, and once an upstart rival disrupts the narcotics trade, things get complicated. By the time Cecil's daughter looks away from her phone long enough to get caught up in a dangerous situation, he knows there are police he can't trust, so he turns to his former clients and a group of forest-dwelling homeless men to set things right, using a plan so ramshackle and intricate it would make Rube Goldberg blush.

In addition to a propulsive, almost hallucinogenic pace threaded with poetic touches of the Alaskan setting and the warmth of Cecil's affection for his family, Straley creates a large and colorful cast of characters infused with tenderness for the poor and the troubled, likely informed by the author's previous career with the public defender's office in Sitka. It's a big-hearted book and a wild ride. Though this is part of a series, there's no need to start at the beginning - though if that's your choice, good news: Soho is reissuing them all.

reposted from Reviewing the Evidence.. show less