Framed as a long testimonial to a panel of judges during sentencing, Cecil Younger, now a criminal defense investigator in Sitka, AK, shares the tale of how an evidence run for a regular client led him to plead his case before the court. With this first new Cecil Younger work in 17 years, Straley (Cold Water Burning) does an excellent job quickly bringing readers up to speed with Cecil's life-his family, colleagues, and clientele. The situation Cecil finds himself in is bleak, but a certain gallows humor is infused throughout, with many references to "Baby's First Felony," a guide he and his boss created for their clients (sample entry: "When talking on the jail phone, Pig Latin is not an unbreakable code"). The full text of the guide is included at the conclusion of the novel, and it is hilarious. The testimonial aspect of the account is somewhat distracting, as the story would have worked as well as a straightforward narrative, but the setting and characters, particularly Cecil himself, more than make up for any awkwardness with the story's structure. Verdict For fans of the Younger series, this is a treat. Readers of Alaska mysteries by Stan Jones and Dana Stabenow would also enjoy this work. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]-Julie Elliott, Indiana Univ. Lib., South Bend © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

JOHN verdon writes grown-up detective novels, by which I mean stories with intelligent plots, well-developed characters and crimes that have social consequences. WHITE RIVER BURNING (Counterpoint, $27), featuring the author's brainy gumshoe-for-hire, Dave Gurney, checks all these boxes. The primary crime is the "coldblooded assassination" of a police officer, who's picked off by a professional sharpshooter. The authorities in the town of White River are supposedly knocking themselves out to solve the case, but the widow has her doubts and asks Gurney to conduct his own inquiries. So when there's a second sniper killing of a cop, he suspects a link to the victims' secret investigation of corruption in their department. Upstate New York locales like White River can be home to a remarkable assortment of social and political factions. Although the main industry is a prison, this seemingly bucolic place attracts enough moneyed weekenders to support a poets' colony and some serious real-estate investors. Verdón indulges his satirical impulses with takedowns of painters who create "burgundy cosmologies" with beet juice and charities like LORA, an animal rescue group that prides itself on spiritually bonding with its fourfooted clients. "We give animals friendship," one devotee explains. "We have conversations." On a deeper level, it seems to Gurney that White River, like many other towns, is "suffering from industrial collapse, agricultural relocation, a shrinking middle-class population, political mismanagement, the spreading heroin epidemic, troubled schools, eroding infrastructure." Verdón doesn't address all these issues, concentrating instead on the racial antagonisms that are fueled by them. Half the populace blames demonstrations by the Black Defense Alliance for stirring up hatred for local law enforcement after a traffic-stop fatality. The other half blames the blamers, creating one of those hate-fests that feed on their own furies. While keeping inside the lines of a classic whodunit plot, Verdón enriches the formula with a probing analysis of the way a community rips itself apart. THE CHILDREN steal the show in Belinda Bauer's unnerving suspense novel, SNAP (Atlantic Monthly, $26). When his mother disappears and his father ambles off in a fog, Jack Bright shoulders the parental duties for his younger sisters, Joy and baby Merry. Washing the windows, painting the front door and mowing the lawn keep snoopers away. ("The lawn mower was the best thing Jack had ever stolen.") But his newfound skills as a burglar - who also raids the kitchen of one house to make a vegetable omelet before settling down for a nap - earn him a cool rep as the "Goldilocks" thief who's unsettling the neighbors and irritating the police. In a secondary plotline that elbows itself into the principal story, a pregnant woman named Catherine While is being taunted by a stalker who leaves a nasty greeting ("I could have killed you") scrawled on a birthday card by her bedside - next to a knife. Bauer's sleuth, Detective Chief Inspector John Marvel, notable for the "piggy cunning" in his eyes, has a hand in tying up both narrative threads. But we're more in awe of young Jack: thief, con man and hero. if your chosen line of work is being a hermit, you couldn't pick a better location than Maquoit, a fogbound island 20 miles off the coast of Maine. In STAY HIDDEN (Minotaur, $26.99), Mike Bowditch, the game warden investigator in Paul Doiron's nature-loving mysteries, flies out to Maquoit to investigate the accidental (or accidental-on-purpose) shooting of a sort-of famous journalist named Ariel Evans. Ariel was supposedly on the island to do research on Blake Markman, a producer who fled Hollywood to live as a hermit and raise Icelandic sheep. But when the ferry arrives from the mainland, who should step onto the dock but Ariel herself - fit as a fiddle and anxious to investigate her own death. Doiron captures the stark beauty of his setting without averting his eyes from the sick and starving wildlife, the rancorous feuds among the lobstermen or the homicidal impulses that push islanders off the deep end. JOHN STRALEY has been holding out on US. BABY'S FIRST FELONY (Soho Crime, $25.95), his first Cecil Younger novel in 17 years, is bursting with the sort of oddball characters who make Alaska's wildlife look tame. Younger, a hapless criminal defense investigator, has had some success in educating his dodgy clients about smart ways to beat a rap. ("Don't hurt the dog and don't do the meth.") He has also witnessed some creative drug-smuggling methods. (Stuff the dope inside a fish.) But when his 13-year-old daughter and her best friend are kidnapped, he finds himself gambling for their lives - and way out of his depth. Straley knows how to wrap deadly violence in a bubble of black humor that suits the novel's beautiful but harsh setting, where whales open their maws to dine on oceans of salmon fry and men kill one another while ravens fly overhead, screaming with laughter. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Shamus Award-winner Straley humanizes slapstick mayhem in his exceptional seventh Cecil Younger mystery (after 2001's Cold Water Burning). Cecil, an investigator for the Public Defender Agency in rainy, grimy Sitka, Alaska, does his best for pathetic and dangerous clients. Unfortunately, a war for control of the local meth trade makes Cecil the holder of a bag of drug money, a bystander during the murder of a Mexican drug mule, and the designated assassin of a female witness against the would-be drug boss, a right-wing lunatic. If Cecil doesn't kill the woman, his kidnapped 13-year-old daughter, Blossom, will die. Since he can't trust official law enforcement officers, he must gather his own rescue squad, including his profoundly pissed-off wife, Jane Marie, and his autistic best friend, Todd. The results are hilarious and horrendous, since Straley never forgets that real, vulnerable people are involved. Interspersed with mordant thoughts about the criminal justice system, the novel builds to a conclusion that's both satisfying and discomforting. Readers will hope they won't have to wait 17 years for Cecil's next adventure. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

After 17 years, Straley checks back in with Cecil Younger and the citizens of Sitka, Alaska, and finds them as wacky as ever and even more murderousa description that applies this time to Cecil as well.When criminal defense investigators for the Public Defender Agency find themselves in courthouses, it's not unusual for them to say, "If it please the Court," as Cecil does in opening his narrative. But his following words"Your Honors, I stand before you today to tell the story of what happened"broadly hint from the beginning that he's in court in a somewhat different capacity than usual. There follows what must surely be the longest, strangest allocution in history or fiction or even in the annals of Straley's cockeyed investigator (Cold Water Burning, 2001, etc.). Nine months after Melissa Bean, a fellow high school student of Cecil's daughter, Blossom, goes missing, her body is found, and Sherri Gault is arrested for her murder. The arrest puts Cecil in an awkward situation for several reasons. Sherri has been a repeat client of his; her longtime partner, a lowlife known as Sweeper who's been an even more frequent client, is eager to sign on as an informant after the latest of his countless arrests; domestic violence charges seem possible for both parties. Things get even worse when Sherri sends Cecil to visit a hotel room she's stayed in to collect some important evidence, which turns out to be a box stuffed with money. Clearly there's more going on here than the usual revolving door of low-level felonies, and the current gets both muddier and more urgent when Blossom and her friend Thistle disappear as well, casting Cecil, who's barely competent as an investigator, as a righteously violent avenger.A waggish, hallucinatory, blood-soaked demonstration of the maxims collected in the titular Baby's First Felony, a brief, fully illustrated do-it-yourself manual for stupid criminals that's helpfully appended after the judges' verdict on the hero. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.