John Straley Libros

After years on the job as a private investigator in Sitka, Alaska, Cecil Younger doesn’t claim to have learned much about humanity as a whole, but he does know this: truth is a slippery thing. When the wife of a former client asks Cecil to find her husband, Cecil agrees. After all, helping to get Richard exonerated during a tragic murder trial three years ago was one of the biggest successes of Cecil’s career. But why, if Richard’s name was cleared, is he MIA now? Patricia, Richard’s steadfast wife, has one guess: someone is after him. It’s no secret that Richard has a long list of enemies, not least of which are the family members of the dead. But things soon get complicated when Patricia is killed, sending Cecil on a desperate trip to sea to chase down the twisted truth.

Trapped on an Alaskan cruise line, PI Cecil Younger must expose a killer—and fast—or he may just find himself sleeping with the fishes. Cecil Younger never thought it would come to this: running surveillance on a chicken coop that’s 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, of course. Well, it’s not exactly a vacation. Cecil has been paid to investigate a doctor aboard a cruise ship up the Alaskan coast following some complaints from his patients . . . that is, the patients who are still alive to complain. Worst of all, someone is leaving evidence pointing an accusing finger at Cecil. By the time the S.S. Westward makes landfall, Cecil will be wishing he was back guarding chickens.

In the third entry to the series, Alaska P.I. Cecil Younger is fresh out of rehab with a head wound, a child custody case from hell, and the clients to match. Confrontational and obsessed, Priscilla DeAngelo is sure her ex is conspiring with a state senator to wrest her son from her, and thus, she hires Cecil Younger to investigate. This is the first time Younger has to deal with lawyers in flashy suits and overused paper shredders. When she storms off to Juneau for a showdown, Younger's custody case swiftly turns into a murder. Younger is fired from the defense team, but he can't stop thinking about the case, and keeps on with the investigation alone. He's not sure what keeps him involved. Is it Priscilla's sister (his lost love)? His regard for truth as a rare commodity? Or the head injury Priscilla's ex gave him? But there's one thing he knows: he won't let go until it's solved, even if it kills him.

Set against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest and southeastern Alaska, this collection of poems celebrates the beauty and rhythms of nature. Straley's narrative style combines sharp wit with intricate details, reflecting on seasonal cycles and the earth's abundance. By blending personal reflections with political themes, he crafts elegies that resonate with honesty and universality, establishing himself as a significant voice among emerging poets.

Alaska, 1935: Slippery Wilson is on his way out of town when he runs into a woman, her neice, and a crashed car. His life is about to get a lot more complicated. It's 1935 and jobs are scarce, but Slippery Wilson walks off his job at a logging camp after a gruesome accident kills a coworker. He's headed for Seattle with all his savings; he plans to buy a piece of farmland and be his own boss. When he stops to help a woman get her car out of a ditch, his life takes a serious detour. The woman is Ellie Hobbs, an anarchist from the docks of Seattle who watches out for her young niece and dreams of flying planes. But right now, she's got one busted nose and has just stuffed a dead man's body into the trunk of her car. So begins the action that will take Slip, Ellie, her niece, and her noisy yellow bird on a heart-stopping adventure up the Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska

In the Alaskan town of Sitka, the living is tough and the crimes are aplenty . . . and plenty personal. When 97-year-old William Flynn is accused of killing his neighbor, Angela Ramirez, he turns to private investigator Cecil Younger with an odd—and, frankly, rather incriminating—request. He wants Cecil to track down a man he believes witnessed Ramirez’s murder: her estranged husband, Simon Delaney. The only problem? Flynn doesn’t just want Cecil to find Delaney. He wants him to kill the man. Cecil knows that kind of thing would be bad for business, but he takes the job, hoping he can both convince Flynn to call off the manhunt and discover what really happened to his neighbor. But the old man isn’t making the job easy. He keeps confusing two different crimes: Angela Ramirez’s recent murder and an 80-year-old tragedy in which four American Legionnaires were killed during an Armistice Day Parade. Cecil struggles to sort through the old man’s befuddled memories and dives into the search for Delaney, which takes him on a journey through Alaska history and all over the Pacific Northwest, from the Aleutian Islands to Centralia, Washington.

Mysterious dreams of grizzly bears, a bumbling FBI agent, and a tense hostage negotiation have the town of Cold Storage, Alaska, turned upside down. Things in the sleepy fishing town of Cold Storage, Alaska, are changing. It’s the summer of 1968; the men are wearing their hair long, the Vietnam War is at its height, and multiple assassinations have gripped the country. But some things remain the same. Ellie’s bar is still the place to catch up on the town gossip, and there’s a lot to talk about, from the boys who have returned from the war (and the ones who haven’t), to the robberies that are plaguing the locals, to the new guy in town: a famous monk from Kentucky. Ellie, herself a fugitive of sorts, is curious about this “Brother Louis,” and worries about his motives, but he seems harmless enough. However, when a handful of other outsiders arrive to town and start poking around the bar and asking questions, Ellie begins to have reservations. Have they followed this mysterious monk, rumored to be the famous author Thomas Merton, to Cold Storage? And what is it that they want, particularly the inept FBI agent with the strange name: Boston Corbett? Inspired by assassination conspiracy theories, the life of Thomas Merton, and the changing tide of the ’60s, Blown by the Same Wind is a coming-of-age story for the town of Cold Storage itself.

An offbeat, often hilarious crime novel set in the sleepy Alaskan town of Cold Storage from the Shamus Award winning author of the Cecil Younger series. Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you’re zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the town is withering. Clive “The Milkman” McCahon returns to his tiny Alaska hometown after a seven-year jail stint for dealing coke. He has a lot to make up to his younger brother, Miles, who has dutifully been taking care of their ailing mother. But Clive doesn’t realize the trouble he’s bringing home. His vengeful old business partner is hot on his heels, a stick-in-the-mud State Trooper is dying to bust Clive for narcotics, and, to complicate everything, Clive might be going insane—lately, he’s been hearing animals talking to him. Will his arrival in Cold Storage be a breath of fresh air for the sleepy, depopulated town? Or will Clive’s arrival turn the whole place upside down?

Shamus Award–winner John Straley returns to his critically acclaimed Cecil Younger detective series, set in Sitka, Alaska, a land of perfect beauty and not-so-perfect locals.Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching would-be felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. He even likes most of the rough characters who seek his services. So when Sherrie, a returning client, asks him to track down some evidence to clear her of a domestic violence charge, Cecil agrees. Maybe he’ll find something that will get her abusive boyfriend locked up for good.Cecil treks out to the shady apartment complex only to discover the “evidence” is a large pile of cash—fifty thousand dollars, to be exact. That is how Cecil finds himself in violation of one of his own Nothing good comes of walking around with a lot of someone else’s money.In this case, “nothing good” turns out to be a deep freeze full of drug-stuffed fish, a murder witnessed at close range, and a kidnapping—his teenage daughter, Blossom, is snatched as collateral for his cooperation. The reluctant, deeply unlucky investigator turns to an unlikely source for the misfit gang of clients he’s helped to defend over the years. Together, they devise a plan to free Blossom and restore order to Sitka. But when your only hope for justice lies in the hands of a group of criminals, things don’t always go according to plan.

The verdict from the three-judge panel is in. Cecil Younger, bumbling criminal defense investigator and totally embarrassing father, has been sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for his involvement in ... well, a number of things, ranging from destruction of private property to killing a guy. But compared to the original twenty-five-year sentence, it's not so bad. His success with getting his sentence reduced has attracted the attention of his fellow inmates, and one man, Fourth Street, reaches out for advice for his upcoming parole hearing in exchange for protection and companionship.When he isn't reading Adrienne Rich or James Baldwin with Fourth Street, Cecil spends his time filling up large yellow legal pads. He writes, mostly, about his teenage daughter, Blossom, who is on a Nancy Drew-like quest to help her friend, George, discover the truth about her biological parents, which turns out to be complicated. After submitting a mail-in genetics test, George learns she is the infamous Baby Jane Doe who was kidnapped from her Native mother shortly after she was born. A media and legal circus quickly ensues, but George's reunion with her birth family isn't the heartwarming story the journalists hoped it would be. There is an even darker secret about the baby-snatching case, one that threatens to destroy not just George's family--but Cecil's as well.