A fun read! ( )

A fun read! ( )

Summary
Cecil Younger, a criminal defense investigator, is no stranger to rough characters. Heck, the majority of the public defender’s clients are “rough”: alcoholics, drug users, petty criminals, but Cecil likes them. Well, most of them. A long-dry alcoholic, he’s built a nice life with his researcher wife Jane Marie (who’s working on a grant proposal and stressed about their daughter); his brother with Asperger’s Todd (who’s learning jokes as therapy); and his teen daughter Blossom, who’s taken to dyeing her hair, calling her parents by their first names, and losing herself in her phone. A young teen girl has disappeared, with drugs as a possible factor, and Jane Marie is worried about Blossom and her BFF, Emily (now known as Thistle). He works for a public defender, David, who’s written a self-help guide of do’s and don’ts for more, uh, intellectually challenged criminals, titled Baby’s First Felony.

When Sherrie, a returning client, begs Cecil to find evidence she says will clear her of criminal charges, he does it . . . and lives to regret this decision.

The evidence is $50K, found in a dubious location frequented by druggies and shady deals, and Cecil’s got it now. But things do awry: that’s what happens when you add meth-heads with guns, drug-stuffed frozen fish, various dirty cops and crooked business people, and a bloody killing.

Cecil wants nothing to do with Sherrie’s money (if it’s even hers). But then his young teen daughter Blossom is abducted to secure his cooperation with the criminal behind the drug deals. Suspecting police involvement, Cecil turns to a motley crew of former clients to aid his rescue of Blossom. Not such a great idea. Get a bunch of ex-cons, add a liberal dose of drugs and alcohol and non-stop rain, and you never know what might happen.

My thoughts
This is seventh in the Cecil Younger series. Though I haven’t read any of the others, this book works as a standalone.

What didn’t work for me:
There were a lot of things I enjoyed about the book, but somehow I was disappointed. I don’t know why. That frustrates me, as this book had many of the elements that I normally enjoy. I had problems reading it and contemplated not finishing it. I hate saying that.

Maybe it wasn’t a good fit for me, or I wasn’t a good fit for the book. Sometimes that just happens.

What worked for me:

Cecil’s narrative tone is wry and often humorous.
Here are two quotes that I enjoyed:

Your Honors, Dashiell Hammett once wrote, “The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter,” but in my experience, the cheaper the hood, and the more excited they are, the more frequently they use the word “fuck.” page 86

With bears and with meth heads with guns, the basic rule is this: don’t seem like food, and don’t challenge them to a fight. Make it seem like you are just too much trouble to kill." page 87

Minor characters were well-rounded.
No spoilers. Sherrie surprised me, as did Gudger, when they showed different aspects of their personalities. Though Sherrie might be a hardened woman, she’s capable of sorrow for a vulnerable person. Though Gudger is an alcoholic inebriate, “institutionalized”, when given the right environment, he thrives.

Cecil’s view of the clients is realistic.
Straley spent several decades as a criminal defense investigator, and that experience shows. Cecil’s realistic about the work of a public defender and their clients. While he has compassion for their situations, he’s not sentimental, optimistic, or soft on crime. Most are guilty. Most will continue to do drugs, shoplift, assault, whatever, no matter how harshly the legal system penalizes them. Some, like Sherrie, have been so mistreated their entire lives that they cannot accept kindness, even genuine kindness. Others, like Cecil’s pal Gudger, are homeless and any roof, even a jailhouse roof, is preferable. All will justify their crimes:

"The hardest lesson for a young public defender to learn is that your clients, even in the midst of doing something completely antisocial, violent or self-destructive, feel justified" page 174

My final thoughts:
I really struggled with this book. As I said earlier, I can’t quite figure out why. I think it might be a case of a mismatch between reader and book. Straley knows how to tell a good story. 3 stars, but I think fans of his previous books might rate this higher. ( )

A plot was not discernable in the first 40 pages and I didn’t care for the characters. The protagonist was depicted as a decent, caring man, albeit somewhat passive. His primary activity seems to be walking from home to the office and back again. His teen-aged daughter was openly insulting and dismissive of her mother and he did nothing to support his wife. In fact, he often cut her off when she tried to stand up for herself.

I read farther than I should before invoking the Pearl rule. ( )

Cecil Younger is in court and in trouble. He's an investigator for the public defender in Sitka, Alaska and an alcoholic who has sworn off the booze long enough to have a loving marriage to a marine biologist, provide a home to an autistic man who was once his legal ward, and raise a beloved daughter who, as Younger explains to the court, has been lost to her cell phone. This is the beginning of his allocution, a statement made by a defendant before sentencing. And a most engrossing allocation it is, though longer than usual and a little hard to explain. It begins, as he tells the judge, in the fall, as the rain never stops falling and people are irritable, "during the period of the jokes and well before the deaths and mayhem."

That's not entirely truthful. The jokes keep coming, along with the mayhem and murder. It begins as Cecil meets with a client who wants to "seek employment with the city" – in other words, become a snitch. Since the client is pretty dim, as many of them are, Cecil makes sure to give him a copy of "Baby's First Felony," an illustrated self-help book with useful advice such as "don't wear the tennis shoes you stole to court when the guy you stole them from will be there to testify and his name is still written inside of them." Though the clientele Cecil works with is not very sophisticated, the method a criminal crew is using to smuggle drugs into the state is, and once an upstart rival disrupts the narcotics trade, things get complicated. By the time Cecil's daughter looks away from her phone long enough to get caught up in a dangerous situation, he knows there are police he can't trust, so he turns to his former clients and a group of forest-dwelling homeless men to set things right, using a plan so ramshackle and intricate it would make Rube Goldberg blush.

In addition to a propulsive, almost hallucinogenic pace threaded with poetic touches of the Alaskan setting and the warmth of Cecil's affection for his family, Straley creates a large and colorful cast of characters infused with tenderness for the poor and the troubled, likely informed by the author's previous career with the public defender's office in Sitka. It's a big-hearted book and a wild ride. Though this is part of a series, there's no need to start at the beginning - though if that's your choice, good news: Soho is reissuing them all.

reposted from Reviewing the Evidence..