Cold Water Burning - Softcover

Straley, John

3.81

218 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553580760 ISBN 13: 9780553580761

Publisher: Bantam, 2001

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Award-winning author of The Angels Will Not Care

P.I. Cecil Younger works out of Sitka, Alaska, a land of perfect beauty and not-so-perfect lives, where there is nothing more dangerous than an unsolved crime — except maybe the man trying to solve it....

Three years ago someone brutally killed four people on the scow Mygirl. In a crowded courtroom Cecil Younger helped the accused go free. Now the man charged with the Mygirl murders has disappeared. As a storm bears down on the Alaskan coast, two people connected with the case die in separate, sudden, and bizarre explosions of gunfire.

Younger is certain that someone is trying to finish the grisly job begun on the Mygirl three years earlier. But to prove it he must chase down a wooden sloop on the wind-lashed sea. Out in the lethal storm Younger will come face-to-face with the shocking truth that has already twisted so many lives — and now could end his own.

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Review:

Cecil Younger, the protagonist of John Straley's series of mysteries set in Sitka, Alaska, isn't exactly a slacker, but as PIs go, he doesn't invest his job with a great deal of energy or effort. In Cold Water Burning, his sixth outing, Cecil stumbles with characteristic good nature through his assignment: to find a missing man he himself helped acquit of burning a boat and killing its occupants. The man's vanished, along with $50,000 a tabloid advanced him for his version of how the crime really went down.

A talented stylist whose prose sparkles like the sun on icy tundra, Straley excels at sketching unusually picaresque characters and painting brilliant word portraits of Sitka's beautiful and unforgiving setting. All the elements are in place for a satisfying thriller--the unsolved murders aboard the Mygirl, Cecil's role in helping the accused man go free, and the anger of the victims' survivors, which ultimately places our hero in the murderer's gun sights. But they take second place to Cecil's relationship with his most trusted mentor, George Doggy, and both the plot and the pace--not exactly a breakneck ride to begin with--suffer as a consequence. There's a brilliant scene right out of The Perfect Storm as Cecil heads out on a very large ocean in a very small boat to rescue Toddy, his autistic housemate. Straley manages to stitch the somewhat ragged edges of the plot together convincingly enough, but he may need to light a fire under Cecil if he expects him to continue to carry this series. --Jane Adams

From the Back Cover:

“Straley’s done the impossible: he’s reinvented the private eye novel.”
— The Denver Post

“Straley’s definitely up there with the great ones.”
— Chicago Tribune

“Now and then a writer dares to flout the rules and, in so doing, carves out a niche that belongs to him alone. John Straley’s novels are like no others.”
— San Diego Tribune

“Like James Lee Burke, Straley transcends the genre.... Marvelous.”
— The Tampa Tribune and Times

“One of the most entertaining detectives since [James Lee Burke’s] Dave Robicheaux.”
— The Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge
Don’t miss John Straley’s other Cecil Younger novels:

The Curious Eat Themselves
The Music of What Happens
Death and the Language Of Happiness
The Angels Will Not Care

Available from Bantam Books

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