This review first appeared in Thrilling Detective.

At the heart of The Woman Who Married a Bear is the Tlingit myth about a woman who falls in love with a bear. They have two children: each half-bear and half-human. The bear feels threatened by the woman’s brothers and tells her they must move deeper into the wilderness. The woman has her children kill and eat the bear.

The actual meaning is way over my head, but then I’ve never been great with parables. Maybe it has something to do with wilderness versus civilization, man versus beast. An old Indian lady tells Alaskan private eye  Cecil Younger this myth, and I’m relieved to report that he doesn’t understand it any better than I did. The old lady looks at him in disgust and says, “I knew you wouldn’t believe it. No matter what you tell a white person it all goes to the same place.”

Nonetheless, she hires Cecil to investigate the murder of her son, Louis Victor. Louis was a big-game hunter and a capital “A” alpha male, killed by Alvin Hawkes, a crazy little guy who worked for Louis. Even though Hawkes was convicted and sentenced for the crime, the old lady doesn’t believe this version of the facts.

Cecil is a well liked if not well respected private investigator in Sitka. Why he is not respected has to do with being an unrepentant drunk and not going into law like his sainted father, the judge. Why he’s well liked becomes apparent as he narrates this story. He is bookish, tolerant and relentlessly curious; a seeker of the truth with enough sense to know that truth is a slippery commodity.

Truth — and the elusive nature of it — is big in this story, and the author, John Straley, has much to say about how the threads of story and fact. are woven together. Or, as Cecil tells us, “If cops collect the oral history of a crime, I gather folklore. And people who have set themselves up to be the judge rarely accept folklore as the whole truth, unless it’s their own story they’re telling.”

Cecil interviews Louis’s widow, who asks him, “How do you expect to find the whole truth for this old Indian woman when you don’t know what the whole truth would feel like to her?”

He replies, “I probably will never know what the whole truth feels like. But I’m a curious guy, and I have only one choice and that is to keep going forward and asking questions.”

Cecil keeps asking his questions even after it becomes increasingly dangerous to do so. In the end he’s satisfied: “I kept my peace. Most old stories don’t have anything to do with facts; they’re the box that all the facts came in.”

The Woman Who Married a Bear has much to say about how to find truth amongst the threads of story and fact. The story is told with great humor and authority — and enough Alaskan details you’ll need an extra sweater when you read it. The ending circles back on the bear myth in a way that feels organic. But the novel’s greatest strength is Cecil Younger. He’s my kind of guy. Now, if he’d only stop drinking so much…

The Woman Who Married a Bear..Buy this book..Kindle it!
By John Straley
Soho Press, copyright 1992.

This review first appeared in Thrilling Detective.

I’m going to say it right off: Right as Rain is a kick-ass book. If you haven’t read it, you should kick yourself. First off, it’s vivid writing. Consider the first sentence: “What Derek Strange was worried about, looking at Jimmy Simmons sitting there, spilling over a chair on the other side of his desk, was that Simmons was going to pick some of Strange’s personal shit up off the desktop in front of him and start winging it across the room.”

Already I’m liking this Derek Strange character. Turns out he’s a successful black PI into the tools of the trade and the rules of common-sense detection. He’s a man who prefers to finesse a situation, not see it go nuclear. If you’re looking for a psychic wound, don’t look at Derek.

He ends up partnering with Terry Quinn, a much younger white dude wanting to mix it up with any bad guy that crosses his path. Terry’s down on his luck, eager to redeem himself, and he’s got psychic wounds galore, on account of his shooting of a black cop in a dicey situation. Although cleared in the police investigation, the media and his own conscience have gutted him. When the story begins, Terry is working in a book store.

You’ve probably guessed that this book is all about race: about prejudice on both sides of the black/white divide, and about how folks who believe they’re color-blind can still make deadly miscalculations. And finally, about how people can learn to work together anyway.

The novel was shaped by the author’s own childhood, when DC erupted in riots following the Martin Luther King assassination in the summer of 1968. Pelecanos was eleven, and he claims his life was changed forever. He knows his characters, and that’s hard to fake.

You won’t find the White House or the Smithsonian in Pelecanos’s DC. He favors the working class neighborhoods and back alleys of the city:

He (Strange) passed an African and a Thai restaurant, and Vinyl Ink, the music store that still sold records, and a jewelry and watch-repair shop that catered to Spanish, and one of many braid-and-nail and dry-cleaning storefronts that low-rised the downtown business district of Silver Spring.
If you have trouble with reading gritty material, then don’t read this book — the grit is the size of river rock. And I haven’t even told you about the drug dealers in this story. Whoa! There’s a pair of white trash crank dealers that will stand your hair on end. And the black hoodlums who deal with them are even deadlier. Strange and Quinn employ every weapon in their arsenal when they go against these guys to sort out the story of what really happened the night Terry gunned down his fellow officer.

Right as Rain has a great cast of characters that I either cared about or was scared of. Its fast-paced, twisty plot kept me guessing right up to the final showdown. I love this book And you should too. Read it.

Right As Rain…Buy this book…Buy the audiobook…Kindle it!
By George Pelecanos
Little Brown, copyright 2001.

Joe Clifford sings the praises of San Francisco, of youth, and the deep attraction that many of us have had for abuse in his newest book, Junkie Love. He sings with the voice of a poet, his writing sure-footed and vivid: Standing on 22nd and Mission, two o’clock on some random Sunday afternoon, fat, orange sun splashing, the mango, melon, and papaya peddlers on rolling carts camped beneath the giant Woolworth’s sign, the Mexican panadarias baking empanadas, rich wheat breads… Here’s how he describes his honeymoon on the Grand Cayman: the entire island had been dipped in coconut tanning oil and spritzed with lime wedges. Contrast that with a drug house he’s squatting in: roaches big as plums and closets that stank like pickle brine and piss…

I reacted to this narrative as both a person who embraced excess in my twenties, and as an anxious mother, imagining how I would feel watching my perfect child destroy himself.

Clifford doesn’t make excuses for all the promises he made and broke to the people who loved him. For the money he stole to finance his habit. For going into rehab time after time when he had zero intention of giving up dope. As squalid as his life was there seemed to be some glory in how deep he could fall, how many chances he could take and still survive. I started to ask myself as I read on, is this the bottom? Is this the bottom? Good god, how far are you going to take this?

My antennae were out, looking for hints of a bad childhood, bad genes, bad love. He doesn’t go there. Of course, we know that Clifford will choose life over addiction (he wrote this book after all) but what led to that choice surprised me. He describes his recovery as an intense journey to self-discovery and health. I’ve never met Clifford, but I suspect he is wiser for having spent a decade in free fall. 

This review first appeared in Thrilling Detective.

            I’ve always suspected that the stoic detective was an easy out for the writer. Write about a sleuth who observes and doesn’t feel? Admit: that takes a lot of the fuss out of the story.

Greg Rucka gives us a different kind of tough guy. His name is Atticus Kodiac. He moons over his lost love, mourns the death of his friend and colleague, and finds a lot missing emotionally with his current squeeze. He’s a man who feels the consequences of his choices, but he’s marching, and it’s the marching that makes him a tough guy in my book. And on the subject of tough, let me just say, there are some women in this story you wouldn’t want to cross.

            Atticus is tasked with providing security for Jeremiah Pugh, the prosecution’s chief witness in a trial against Big Tobacco.  Two attempts have been made on Pugh’s life, the second one so ingenious it’s believed that one of the ten deadliest assassins in the world has been hired to take Pugh out. The assassin is completely anonymous. No one has been able to identify his age, nationality or even his preferred method of killing. He is known simply as John Doe.  

If that wasn’t enough for Atticus to handle, he’s forced to work hand-in-hand with Elliot Trent, the not-so-bright owner of a private security firm, Sentinel Guards. Trent has never liked Atticus and probably likes him a whole lot less now that Atticus is schtupping Trent’s only daughter.

The stakes are high for Atticus: save Pugh and save his own life and those of his co-workers against the threat of John Doe. Save Pugh and take out Big Tobacco. Save Pugh and restore his shredded reputation from previous failures.

It’s worth reading to see if Atticus triumphs and to discover the identity of John Doe. The issue I had with the story is Jeremiah Pugh. I can’t decide whether he’s just not believable or if I just don’t like him. He does all these weird, unexplainable things, like making a show of drinking vodka from sun-up to sun-down in front of his bodyguards. He lets Atticus in on his secret: he’s watered down the booze. Why? If this had a point, it went zoom—over my head. Then there’s Pugh’s plan to commit suicide as soon as he has given his testimony. All this does is lower the story stakes for me.

And like me, Atticus is dismayed with Pugh. Here he is, risking his life and the lives of his team to save this guy against the deadliest killer in the world. And Pugh plans to off himself as soon as it’s over?

But we want Atticus to triumph. We like him. He’s tough.