From Amazon.com
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
From Publishers Weekly
Cecil Younger, the Sitka, Alaska, PI who last appeared in Death and the Language of Happiness (1997), is one of the poorer, but often more interesting, investigators in contemporary crime fiction: his current job is trying to catch a chicken thief. It looks as though Cecil might finally catch a break, however, when he's hired to conduct a modest investigation aboard a cruise ship and even gets to take along his long-suffering girlfriend, Jane Marie, as well as his entertaining roommate, Toddy. But the SS Westward is hardly the Love Boat with its motley international crew and its bizarre complement of passengers from the L'Inconnue De La Seine Travel Club. And its two-week cruises have an awfully high mortality rate, which is why the cruise company has asked Cecil discreetly to investigate the ship's doctor. Discretion is not one of Cecil's strong points. Nor, for that matter, is detection. Against the backdrop of onboard games, dances, songfests and whale-spotting, a surrealistic dance of death and mutilation is also taking place. Worse, Cecil finds himself auditioning for the role of victim or scapegoat rather than that of hero. Quirky and quixotic, Straley's hero is a perfect fit for the spectacular landscape he inhabits.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
