Death and the Language of Happiness

Alaska's splendor and isolation are beautifully evoked in Straley's features starring down-at-the-heels PI Cecil Younger (The Music of What Happens, 1996). But like Cecil, who can't quite get his life together, this plot lacks coherence. Angela Ramirez, a local woman and alcoholic mother of two youngsters, is shot to death in a hotel room. The police find the murder gun in the room of 97-year old former labor agitator William Flynn, who claims he's innocent. Flynn hires Cecil to find Angela's husband, Simon Delaney, a union organizer who had recently decamped, and who, the old man insists, knows about Angela's murder and earlier deaths. Members of Cecil's entourage make their expected appearances: his iconoclast lawyer, Dickie Stein; his loving girlfriend, Jane Marie; and his autistic housemate, Todd. The case winds back to the Centralia Massacre of 1919, when a gunfight broke out between American Legion marchers and Industrial Workers of the World members during an Armistice Day parade in Centralia, Washington. Several men died and two Wobblies vanished. In the process of finding Angela's murderer, Cecil also discovers what happened to the missing Wobblies nearly 80 years before. The scenery and well-integrated historical detail provide a welcome dimension to the often confusing, unevenly developed plot. (Mar.)