Angels Will Not Care by
John Straley
hbk out October 99
Published by Gollancz
at £16.99
Try and get a hold of this. The tour companies are offering suicide
trips on a cruise liner called the Westward. If you've got AIDS or some
other reason for wanting to terminate your life, you simply book a trip
on the Westward and by the time the tour is over, so is your life.
Cecil Younger, Alaskan private-eye, is given the job of finding out who
is actually doing the deed(s), and how he or she is managing to get away
with it.
I like Cecil Younger and I like John Straley. I think Straley is a good
writer and he has a sense of humour. But with this one I began to think
that I liked the earlier Cecil Younger books better than the later ones.
The author is good on Alaska, there's no getting away from that. He
loves the place, and the sea, and the sea birds and the scenery and the
history. The word pictures that he paints are truly poetic, never
descending into the gushing purple prose of a James Lee Burke.
And he has this trick; he doesn't creep up on you from behind, but
slowly he draws you into his world. Cecil's odd, there's no getting away
from that, and he hangs out with and meets along the way a whole bunch
of other odd, weird and eccentric people. But his tenuous grip on the
world is attractive and after just a couple more chapters you start to
see the colour of his world and begin to feel at home there.
The characters and the scenery are so well drawn that it almost feels
like an accident when the mysteries begin to unfold - a hand sawn from a
corpse, a body cremated with undue haste and everyone on the ship
seeming to form alliances. The other trick that Straley uses is to make
you feel that nothing really bad is ever going to happen to Cecil. But
that is before he strands him and his girlfriend on a frozen beach with
a very large and very large wild bear.
If you're thinking of going on a cruise you'll need something to read.
Maybe this isn't the book you should take with you. Leave it at home to
read when you get back . . . if you get back.
(
John Baker
- author of the Sam Turner mysteries and one of Britain's most highly acclaimed writers)
