It's been far from ordinary all along -- that is, John Straley's Alaskan crime fiction series featuring Cecil Younger, a not-quite-lawyer who at this point has served four years so far in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. That means he has roughly three more to go. And for a man who's worked in a form of law enforcement in the past, prison is a threatening environment. Even though he's there for murder.
Things could be worse. Cecil killed to protect his daughter, Blossom. Some prisoners sympathize. But a lot more are after him for various reasons, including money. He admits in his pencil-on-yellow-pad narrative, "Friend write me letters wanting to know how I survive in jail. I don't know why they don't come right out and ask me if I have come someone's bitch, which is what they both do and don't want to know."
With his next statement, "The fact is, I have become someone's bitch," Cecil's story breaks ways from conventional crime novel trails of the past, even of Straley's past (and he's never shied away from the depressing brutality of some Alaskan lives before this). Cecil's trying terribly hard to walk a line between "loving" a brutal gangster enough to get protected, and at the same time not getting raped.
Straley's a plain, direct storyteller who lays out both action and emotion without any fuss. So we get this from Cecil Younger, in his struggle to explain:
Until I came to prison, I enjoyed the privilege of being white and old. I'm almost sixty now, and I've been told by more-experienced convicts that I have "worried eyes" that make me an easy mark. I had been an investigator for the Public Defender Agency, which made me unpopular to a large portion of the population and a popular object of ridicule for some of the weakest minds inside the walls.
Remarkably, Fourth Street -- a drug dealer and pimp from the Lower 48 who's settled into the region, and now into the prison -- wants something that only Cecil seems likely to provide:
"I have a parole hearing coming up in twenty-four months. There are four white women sitting on the parole board. I want you to teach me how to speak respectfully to these bitches."
That leads into marvelous scenes of Cecil trying to teach both poetry and polite language to a very rough and powerful man. And trying to stay away from both Fourth Street's amorous hands, and Street's massive and emotional jealous lover. For a while, Cecil holds the tricky balance.
But it all collapses when his daughter's best friend, a girl nicknamed George, manages to get her own parents tagged as notorious kidnappers, Cecil's daughter Blossom plunges into both action and risk, and suddenly Cecil wants and needs more from Fourth Street. And it's going to cost him. Big.
The riotous mixture of misunderstandings, negotiations, escapes, and frankly amorous pressures and actions makes SO FAR AND GOOD a page-turner from the start. Moving this book onto the shelves of "classics" and "read this one again!" are the neatly nailed emotions and bargains struck throughout. Prepare to gasp in surprise, alternating with gasps of dismay and revelations of what love and kindness can make people do, versus those who've got neither. Oh yes, money matters, too.
No need to read Straley's other Cecil Younger Investigations before this one, as it's hands-down the best yet. But when the winter's getting under your skin and you want to remind yourself that it could be worse in, say, Alaska ... scoop up the other seven and have your own literary festival. No handguns allowed.
Just released by Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press.
PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.
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