The Angels Will Not Care

PI Cecil Younger works out of Sitka, Alaska, a place of stark beauty and unpredictable danger, where a man paid to look for the truth can just as easily disappear and even the angels will not care.

Cecil Younger never thought it would come to this--providing surveillance for a chicken coop being raided by a fowl thief. But things have not exactly been breaking right lately for the Alaskan PI. The logical thing to do? Take a vacation cruise.

Well, it's not exactly a vacation. Younger has been paid to investigate a suspicious ship's doctor aboard a luxurious first-class cruise ship. Now Younger finds himself trapped on a ship of fools with a murderer who is leaving a trail of well-to-do passengers in his wake...and leaving evidence pointing an accusing finger at Cecil! By the time the S.S. Westward makes landfall up the Alaskan coast, Younger will be wishing he was back guarding chickens...instead of sleeping with the fishes.

If Cecil Younger, John Straley's Alaska P.I., plied his trade in the lower 48, he'd probably have to work another job to pay his rent. As it is, he barely ekes out a living chasing chickens as well as two-legged deadbeats in Sitka, where he lives with an autistic roommate and a part-time lover who's a lot more ambitious than he is. So when he's offered a job investigating why so many people are dying on the SS Westward, Straley takes readers along on a luxury cruise in the icy waters of the Inland Passage. L'Inconnue de la Seine is a very unusual travel club--while most of its members are in ill health to begin with, there's something besides coincidence that's killing them before their time. Is it the ship's doctor who's responsible, or are there more sinister forces at work? When Cecil stumbles onto the truth behind the escalating mortality rates, he's rudely put ashore on an island inhabited only by bears. Fortunately for him, his girlfriend is a marine biologist who not only knows how to make a gourmet dinner out of sea slugs but can also talk a hungry bear out of having her and Cecil for dessert. What makes Straley's series so interesting are his extraordinary descriptive talents--if this is as close to Alaska as the reader of these finely wrought novels ever gets, it's almost as good as being there. --Jane Adams