June 1, 2024
Shamus Award winner Straley ("Cecil Younger" series) writes an off-kilter standalone set across the Pacific Northwest. Retired marine biologist Delphine is facing her end when she sees a woman and child victimized and later discovers that the woman has disappeared. Delphine decides to mount a rescue with the help of friends and a queer biker gang. Prepub Alert.
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September 9, 2024
After living with pancreatic cancer for three years, 60-something retired marine biologist Delphine is preparing to stop chemo treatments when an appeal from an old friend thrusts her into danger in this elegiac standalone from Straley (the Cecil Younger series). The request comes from an associate of Delphine’s late husband who’s working to recover a child whose mother surrendered her to black-market baby broker Tyler Dearborn—whom Delphine happens to recognize from her Seattle hospital’s ER. Though undercover sleuthing is one of the last activities she’s equipped for, Delphine craves more action than writing transfer memos to her colleagues in whale research. Soon, she winds up in the middle of a treacherous battle between Tyler’s child-trafficking ring and an Aryan biker gang. Straley seamlessly interweaves heart-pumping action, fascinating insights on whales’ social behavior, and poignant flashbacks to Delphine’s life before she got sick. Though the plot relies heavily on coincidence, its emotional core rings true—largely because of Delphine, whom Straley reveals in the acknowledgments is based on his wife, a former investigator and marine biologist who has Parkinson’s. It’s potent stuff. Agent: Kerry D’Agostini, Curtis Brown.
October 1, 2024
Straley, the author of the Cecil Younger series and the Cold Storage novels, turns in a stellar performance with this stand-alone. Delphine is a marine biologist; she's retired now, but do we ever stop being who we were for so many years? On occasion, she worked with her late husband, a private investigator, to bring criminals to justice. A diagnosis of terminal cancer has thrown her for a loop, but one thing we learn about Delphine early on is that she is not a woman to waste a lot of precious time wallowing in self-pity. A chance encounter, a missing woman and child, and soon Delphine is once again in investigator mode. Can she find the missing mother and child before she runs out of time? Straley's books have always put character ahead of plot; and, while this novel certainly has a complex and suspenseful story, it's Delphine who's the centerpiece. She's simply a wonderful character: a woman who, even approaching the end of her own life, is more concerned for the lives of strangers. This tale packs an emotional wallop.
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November 15, 2024
A sometime detective's search for an adopted infant whose mother wants to reclaim him unfolds in ways that are strange even for Straley, who sets a high bar for strange. Time was when Delphine Stockard served as her husband John's partner in D & J Investigations, which helped criminal defense attorneys build their cases. But even before John was killed by a drunk driver, they dissolved the partnership, and Delphine, trained as a biologist, went back to her first love: studying the mental processes of large-brain animals. Now, she's been stricken with pancreatic cancer, and the end is clearly upon her. In the meantime, though, John's old friend Tom Foster, who still works as a PI, pleads with her to help him locate a 15-month-old whose mother sold him as a newborn to Tyler Dearborn, a self-described rancher who's rumored to have pimped out endless young women and sold their offspring to finance his dreams of amassing a fortune in gold. Delphine's not interested in bringing the repellant Tye to justice; she just wants to recover the three babies she's told are traveling with him. She has no trouble locating Tye and his associate, the Babysitter, but neither of them will listen to reason, and the dying Delphine brings limited resources to the job of persuading them. This non-whodunit would already be unusual, even if it weren't repeatedly interrupted by Delphine's memories of her life before and during her marriage and long passages that provide more information about whales than anything you've read sinceMoby-Dick. The result--with a heroine based, as Straley notes in his closing acknowledgments, on his real-life wife--is, well, strange. The real star here is the tranquil, hard-won meditations on mortality tucked into every crevice.
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