The Angels Will Not Care

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. (Aug.)