Outrageous Alaska Adventure from John Straley, BLOWN BY THE SAME WIND

The town of Cold Storage, Alaska, is John Straley's best invention: a place where almost any sort of humane criminal activity can and does happen, with a steady twang of Alaskan country music in the background and a slew of strong women enjoying cash-poor life as much as the men around them. The minute you aim for this locale, you give up control of what makes sense -- and ride with a mix of wild characters for the duration. Earlier Cold Storage novels began with The Big Both Ways, then Cold Storage, Alaska, and What Is Time to a Pig? 

It's crime fiction ... sorta. Remember the scene in The Godfather with the horse's head? That could happen in Cold Storage, on the chilly and salty coast. Except it could be a grizzly head. Still attached. And the person who held the door for the bear to come in would still be standing nearby, tipping back a beer (not the "craft" kind).

There was still no road into or out of Cold Storage, but somehow, in 1968, the world had arrived. In March, Lyndon Johnson announced that he had decided not to rub for president. Some said it was because of the Tet Offensive in the first part of the year. Boys from Cold Storage had gone to the war and three of them had died ... All of the boys had fished with their families and were memorialized on a hill off the road to the dump.

But the tale gets into gear with one of the boys who made it home, Glen Andre, with long hair, a tendency to not speak much, and an army jacket "with a bronze star pinned on the front." Because this is, after all, Cold Storage, you should simply nod hello with the rest of the crowd when the Kentucky anti-war monk Thomas Merton also arrives in town ... followed by a couple of obviously nasty criminals, and a probable FBI agent.

Still, even in Cold Storage, if a person wants privacy he can sort of get it, and if Thomas Merton wants to call himself Brother Louis, and teach something about God, that's up to him. The trouble is, he's explaining it to a striking young woman named Venus, who never met a boundary she didn't want to cross. Or a man who wasn't fascinated by her.

[The brother] began to see Venus not as an American teenager, but as a sprite from A Midsummer Night's Dream. On that night he followed Venus and the lights on her helmet up the hill, where at the summit he would try to reveal the mystery of both God's omniscience and His absence as Louis's heart beat like a steam engine in his chest.

By this point, either you devoutly want to read this novel, or you wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot bookmark. If you've embraced Donald Westlake, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, or the Junior Bender books from Timothy Hallinan, I hope you're already ordering a copy of BLOWN BY THE SAME WIND. You're going to have a lot of fun and an occasional moment of thinking maybe you just figured out something you care about, a lot. 

Published, of course, by the boundary-challenging 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.

Remarkable New Alaskan Crime Fiction from John Straley, SO FAR AND GOOD

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.

Winter Crime Fiction: Going Dark with Straley, Schneider, Jurjevics

Things have changed.

The very darkest crime fiction used to be a specialty of a handful of smaller publishers, including a number that dealt only in "paperback originals" (PBOs). And the setting option hit Los Angeles a lot -- or any other location where strong drink and addicted private investigators could make sense.

My thought for this evening is that the spread of Norwegian crime fiction acted as a wedge to open American (and American-connected) publishers to the power of grim narrative that sweeps beyond a gritty locale and an unpleasant detective. But that could also be seen more broadly, as some very dark fiction from Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Australia also began to reach the US, either via translation or by multinational publishing operations.

Let's get to specifics of this winter's dramatic new offerings.

From Soho Press, in the hands of experienced award-winning author John Straley (former writer laureate of Alaska; Shamus winner for The Woman Who Married a Bear) comes a bizarre twist of speculative fiction and cultural haunting in WHAT IS TIME TO A PIG? The title comes from a farming joke told early in the book -- then echoes into the macabre, along with a "ticking clock" effect that spikes the long rounds of philosophy onto a thriller timeline. Long-time readers of Straley's books may see a gradual buildup to this, but ... it's definitely cutting new ground!

Here's the basis of the "speculative" aspect: There's been a War, started with North Korea sending a missile into Straley's invented town of Cold Storage, Alaska. And industry has formally taken over the prison system, turning inmates into employees at such a rate that there's no incentive to release them! Gloomy Knob (his prison nickname) is one of those prisoners -- and gets snatched out of his mostly comfortable rut, with his wife's life under imminent threat and a race to locate a missing warhead.

Straley mingles the return of Jesus with the buffalo and a Ghost Dance Movement, and sends Gloomy stumbling into visions on the highway. Picking out the threads of goodness and potential survival is beyond Gloomy's level of life awareness ... although he's actually pretty good at guilt and remorse. Moments like this one echo: "Gloomy pushed the dog down and it ran off behind him. 'Who are you?' Gloomy asked. He felt as if ice were unclogging in his heart. 'You know who I am,' she said, her voice rising and color coming to her cheeks. 'You know who I am because you came straight to this house. You know who I am. I almost went to jail for you.'" [Release date Feb. 4]

Under its Poisoned Press imprint, Sourcebooks packs a debut police procedural from Joseph Schneider that dips into the grotesque and bizarre, while walking through what at first seems like ordinary Los Angeles life. LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel, a former academic who's not yet trusted by his colleagues, snags a case that hangs on both a screenplay and some of the most twisted tortures of the past -- the LONG past (think Greek mythos, even). Jarsdel himself, protagonist of a promised series, is a surprisingly sweet guy who tangles in an affectionate way with one of the crime victims along his path -- made miserable and lonely by the work of a serial pet killer who strikes during the weddings of the pet owners. ONE DAY YOU'LL BURN is a grim title and threatens horrendous torture along the way, but includes a lot of pure LA "camp" with a lot of film fun -- and I couldn't put it down. I kept hoping Jarsdel might prove himself and "get the girl" at the same time. There's even a moment when "He now knew, in painstaking detail, how G --- had died." But instead there's a highly satsifying and grim ending ahead. Make room on the bookshelf for the sequels. [Release date Feb. 4]

Latvian-born Juris Jurjevics remains a hero to those who sought powerful international crime fiction for American readers when it was much harder to find. A publisher and co-founder of Soho Press, he retired in 2006 to embrace writing his won books. He completed PLAY THE RED QUEEN only months before his death, and Soho's celebrated editor Juliet Grames saw the manuscript through to publication. Set during the American occupation of South Vietnam (aka the Vietnam War), it opens with two members of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Staff Sergeant Ellsworth Miser and Sergeant Clovis Auguste Robeson, assigned to a high-pressure investigation: A Vietnamese woman with astonishing sniper-type firearm skills is killing American officers, and the third incident has taken the bad press over the top. Miser's got his hands full, especially because people often ignore his dark-skinned partner, who's also blocked from tackling some of the investigating.

The captain fixed us with his hombre stare. "Our betters are already in a twist about this Red Queen. If she manages to take out somebody prominent, that will really ratchet their knickers. They want the lady dealt with before she gets that chance ... You're within your rights to shoot the b**** where she stands. Got it?"

Robeson looked uneasy. "We ain't one of Counselor Nhu's death squads, captain."

I put a hand on his shoulder. Times like these, I remembered how many years I had on him, especially the three in Korea.

The writing is a bit uneven, especially in the first half of the book, but Jurjevics paints 'Nam brilliantly and piles great plot twists onto his investigators' shoulders. Keep reading, and chances are you'll feel well rewarded for the journey. At least, I did! [Release date Feb. 11]

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Alaskan Crime Fiction from Keenan Powell, HEMLOCK NEEDLE

It's winter in Vermont, and the weather's taken on an ambition to reflect the storms of the nation's capital: Gusty, icy, sometimes bright with color, but determinedly making things harder, day by day. And with the shortening hours of light, a person needs to take deliberate action to avoid freezing into some seasonal depression.

Reading mysteries set in Alaska might be a good notion, about now.

Crime fiction often goes dark when it's set in northern landscapes. Nordic noir exposes the cost of unhealed grief and trauma -- often, as in the hands of Henning Mankell, tugging a reluctant and damaged sleuth across the landscape. John Straley and Stan Jones tilt the darkness into the murders and abuse in their Alaskan crime fiction instead.

Keenan Powell takes another direction. Although her sleuth Maeve Malloy has reason to be bitter -- her choices in love have burned her and her career badly -- she can't afford time for a pity party. HEMLOCK NEEDLE is the second in the series (the first was Deadly Solution), and just as Maeve received notice that there's a bar complaint against her legal career, she confronts an irresistible emergency: Single mom Esther Fancyboy has vanished, and Esther's seven-year-old son Evan wants Maeve to find his mother. Now.

Powell spins a lively page-turner, with well-paced variation from action plot to Maeve's own issues. A former Anchorage attorney herself, she also dips heavily into Yu'Pik Eskimo culture:

Margaret continued. "In the village, when someone gets lost, their soul wanders the tundra. They look different from real people, all white. If you see them, they run away. They're afraid of living people."

Esther had been missing three days. No call, no text message from her at all. No effort to assure her seven-year-old son that she was alright, that he was loved, and that he didn't need to be afraid. By now, there was a pretty good chance that she was a ghost.

But until there was proof, Maeve would assume she was still alive and needed help.

It's touchy to write crime fiction that crosses cultures (white legal person, Yu'pik Eskimo community). Evaluating whether the author's crossed the line of #ownvoices is tough. The best measure that Powell has done this cleanly, though, is that her writing almost always stays inside Maeve's thinking: Her other Alaskan voices speak for themselves, but with restraint, and she writes with respect and a touch of awe about the customs and beliefs among her characters. Even the missing woman Esther Fancyboy, is a chief financial officer, someone strong and active and likeable.

Although the physical copy of the book, from Level Best Books, has the feel of a low-budget self-published work, HEMLOCK NEEDLE provides a well-written, hard-driving investigation with memorable characters. It stacks up well against the more experienced Alaska crime fiction voices of Jones and Straley, and I'll be watching for the sequel.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

New Alaska Crime Fiction from Stan Jones, THE BIG EMPTY (Nathan Active #6)

Love? Money? Competition for a job? Or something more sinister? If Chukchi, Alaska, police chief Nathan Active can figure out the motive, he'll be halfway to solving the recent double murder of a young couple whose airplane's been sabotaged.

Because yes, in THE BIG EMPTY (co-authored by Patricia Watts), the death of this popular pair is quickly revealed to be intentional. Maybe if Nathan's friend Cowboy hadn't known the couple so well, they'd have accepted the idea of a flying accident -- accidents do happen. But it didn't make sense, and plain ordinary investigation by the pair shows a simple but clever way to defeat the plane's systems and good piloting.

The problem is, there's a lot of friction in Chukchi right now. And that, of course, is what makes a crime novel by Stan Jones so interesting: Isolated in distance and complicated by changing cultures, Chukchi provides a lot of reasons for people hurting each other instead of solving things together. Even in Nathan's home, there are layers of secrets and stresses: His wife Gracie, a survivor of terrible abuse, is pregnant with their child and not sure how (or whether) to handle it; their adopted daughter Nita, 13 and mixed up, isn't handling this well, either.

As a crime novel/police investigation, THE BIG EMPTY provides a clever set of small twists on its way to establishing that motive. But the biggest reasons to read the book are for the time spent "within" Alaska's Inupiat culture (handy to have a glossary at the start!), and the struggle over how a family forms and persists. Add the book to any Alaska shelf, but first to a stack of good winter reading, satisfying at the heart.

Once again, it's Soho Press bringing out the book -- available this week.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

New in John Straley's Great Alaskan Crime Fiction Series, BABY'S FIRST FELONY -- and More

It's always great when a new Cecil Younger investigation comes out from Alaskan author John Straley -- the series has been one of the slower type, without the annual push to publish that many others have. No problem: Each one's been worth the wait, and BABY'S FIRST FELONY is a great summer read. Plus, there's more exciting news -- see the end paragraphs for details.

First, what's Cecil Younger up to? He's a criminal defense investigator, and a big part of his job is coaching clueless felons on how to behave in and around court (like, Don't come to court in shoes you stole ... really ... see a lively Straley interview here). Let's quickly add that not all the criminals are totally stupid; plenty are smart enough to make a profit somehow from their crimes. But as Straley advises, "Reality is always, always more complicated than our ability to plan for it."

And that's the situation for Cecil Younger as this book opens -- a habitual offender already known to him turns up as a client again, and when Sherrie asks him to track down the evidence she's sure will get her through court and out of jail, Cecil of course agrees. The complication is, once he starts poking into the drug and prostitution stuff where Sherrie's been hanging, he finds his own teenage daughter, naive and rebellious, showing up in the same house. Getting her home again takes all he's got (although he picks up the evidence along the way). But his daughter's now a known lever to use against him, and when she gets kidnapped, he's facing major pressure to commit crimes himself -- not just the kind on paper that most anyone might -- and even so, his daughter's life and his marriage are majorly at risk. Here's his wife confronting him:

"Our daughter is missing. You disappear and give me no information where you f*ing disapper to, and then you turn up drunk? Unbelievable. ... The police won't answer my calls. Her friends are frantically trying to find her. Todd is walking around town and just calling her name as if she were a lost dog ... and where the hell are you?" Jane Marie's voice was leaden and accusatory.

"I'm going to a card game to get her back," I said ... or at least I think I said. What was certain was Jane Marie threw a dry shirt at me and held out a clean denim jacket. She jammed some loose bills into the jacket pocket and started punching me.

"Get out of my house." She was shrill now. "Get out and don't come back. Go."

I may have fallen down the staircase because I was bleeding when I veered out into Katlian Street in the rain.

Cecil's got a lot more pain in front of him, and more disastrous choices -- all of which he's pretty much forced into. (See whether you can figure any way he could have avoided them.)

Straley admits he pushed the plot to display a wide range of disasters that come from breaking your own hard-learned rules for life. He should know -- he's now retired from nearly 30 years as a criminal defense investigator himself. I sure do hope that means there will be more books from him, a tad more often. But I'll wait as long as necessary.

Now, the big good news as a plus to all this: Soho Crime (imprint of Soho Press) just brought out softcover versions of four earlier Cecil Younger investigations! Pester your local bookseller to stock them all (tell them to go directly to Paul Oliver, a VP at the press, e-mail poliver@sohopress.com). Summer reading stack? If you can stretch them out some, you might get all the way into autumn.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Best February Treat Yet: COLD STORAGE, ALASKA from John Straley

What kind of guy is author John Straley? Well, he just asked on his Twitter feed, "Does this interview make me look fat?"

So settle into his newest crime fiction crossover with rural humor in COLD STORAGE, ALASKA -- named for the remote fishing outpost where Miles McCahon's been taking care of people at the tiny health center, watching over his dying mother, and waiting for the moment when his dedicated criminal of a brother is sure to come home. And here we are: Clive McMahon is on his way, having stopped first to gather up the cash he's sure is his ... of course, it happened to be in a storage box owned by a mob boss, but why would that mean trouble might follow Clive home??

Don't think Westlake for this caper crime novel, though; think Clyde Edgerton maybe, or a tender, kinder version of Janet Evanovich (do you look fat in that comparison, Mr. Straley? not a bit). Because what makes Straley (a criminal investigator in the "real" Alaska) and his books stand out is the way his characters treat each other: with a reliable sense of love and awe, even if they do get distracted by thinking they are hearing talking animals or making a pilgrimage to the Dalai Lama.

Yes, pilgrimage to the Dalai Lama -- it's Billy who's up to that one. Here's a sample from when Billy gets rescued from the cold ocean by Bonnie, who will soon have her own important role in Cold Storage:

They both woke up in the infirmary on the boat. They were covered in warm blankets which felt as if they had just come from the dryer. Hot pads sat on their chests and bellies, the extension cords running out from under the blankets.

The ship's doctor leaned over Billy and asked him if he knew where he was.

"I'm in the Universe," Billy said with a smile on his face.

"Exactly," the doctor said and patted the shivering man's shoulder.

The plot that entangles Miles (who's well worth caring about) and Clive (and that's another) and their village includes a bar that's a part-time church, as well as the aforementioned mob boss. I hope you'll treat yourself to a copy of this wacky and enjoyable romp. I am hoping to forget most of the details over the next year, so that next February I can re-read the whole thing and laugh and smile anew.

PS -- Thanks Soho Crime. You sure do know how to pick 'em. Straley's earlier title was The Curious Eat Themselves -- and then there's The Woman Who Married a Bear, and The Big Both Ways. But this may be the best yet.