The Music of What Happens - Softcover

Straley, John

3.66

348 ratings by Goodreads

9780553572056: The Music of What Happens

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553572059 ISBN 13: 9780553572056

Publisher: Crimeline, 1997

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A defense investigator working out of Sitka, in the Alaskan coastal archipelago, Cecil Younger walks a narrow line between the truth and what his clients pay him to find....The Music of What Happens.

Younger's got the child custody case from hell, and a client to match.  Shrill, confrontational, and obsessed, Priscilla DeAngelo is sure her ex is conspiring
with a state senator to wrest her son from her.  When she storms off to Juneau for a showdown, Younger's custody case swiftly turns into a murder.  Fired from her defense team, Younger stays with the investigation.  He's not sure what keeps him bulldogging the case--Priscilla's sister, his lost love; his regard
for truth as a rare commodity; or the head injury Priscilla's ex gave him--but he won't let go until it's solved.

But this time, the truth is less likely to set him free than to get him
killed....

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Review:

"I never find the smoking gun or the lead pipe with the bloody fingerprints on it, because everyone is looking for those. I find everything else, everything that has been left in the overturned rooms: the surface that wasn't blood-spattered, the dust on the knickknacks and family photo albums, but not on the exceptionally clean retirement plaque; the music on the radio in the empty hallway after everyone has been taken to jail or the morgue. I do this because there is always trace evidence of innocence, and innocence is largely overlooked, even by a man oiling a gun with a child crying in the background on the day before a killing." That voice is so original it can only belong to Straley, who introduced us to Alaskan investigator Cecil Younger in The Woman Who Married a Bear and The Curious Eat Themselves. This time out, Younger is trying to help the sister of an old girlfriend keep custody of her little boy. The wealthy, powerful family she has married into says she's unstable, an unsuitable mother -- but their opposition has sinister roots.

From the Publisher:

"The voice is so original that it can only belong to John Straley....Definitely up there with the great ones."
--Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Straley's prose continues to dazzle....His word-pictures have a hallucinatory brilliance appropriate...to the eerie beauty of the Alaskan landscape."
--The Wall Street Journal

"[An] energetic run-for-your-life adventure...that Mr. Straley writes with such brio."
--The New York Times Book Review

"By now John Straley is much watched for....A humdinger of a book."
--The Boston Sunday Globe

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