Baby's first felony

No cover — John Straley: Baby's first felony (2018)

241 pages

English language

Published July 6, 2018

ISBN:: 978-1-61695-878-7
OCLC Number:: 1006301235

No rating (1 review)

"Shamus Award-winner and critical darling John Straley returns to his beloved Cecil Younger series, set in Sitka, Alaska. Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. He and his colleague have even started writing a helpful handbook with tips such as: Don't wear the tennis shoes you stole to court when the guy you stole them from will be there to testify and his name is still written inside of them. But when Cecil follows a lead from a defendant and walks out of a shady apartment complex with a suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars in cash, he suddenly finds himself in violation of one of his own rules: Nothing good comes of walking around with a lot of someone else's money. And the suitcase is only the beginning. Delivered in the form of a statement to a panel of three judges, …

"Shamus Award-winner and critical darling John Straley returns to his beloved Cecil Younger series, set in Sitka, Alaska. Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. He and his colleague have even started writing a helpful handbook with tips such as: Don't wear the tennis shoes you stole to court when the guy you stole them from will be there to testify and his name is still written inside of them. But when Cecil follows a lead from a defendant and walks out of a shady apartment complex with a suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars in cash, he suddenly finds himself in violation of one of his own rules: Nothing good comes of walking around with a lot of someone else's money. And the suitcase is only the beginning. Delivered in the form of a statement to a panel of three judges, we find a reluctant, deeply unlucky investigator who, in a single day, manages to find a deep freeze full of drug-stuffed fish, witness a murder at close range, and have his teenage daughter kidnapped and held as collateral"--

1 edition

barbara fister reviewed Baby's first felony by John Straley (A Cecil Younger investigation -- 7)

Review of "Baby's first felony" on 'LibraryThing'

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Cecil Younger is in court and in trouble. He's an investigator for the public defender in Sitka, Alaska and an alcoholic who has sworn off the booze long enough to have a loving marriage to a marine biologist, provide a home to an autistic man who was once his legal ward, and raise a beloved daughter who, as Younger explains to the court, has been lost to her cell phone. This is the beginning of his allocution, a statement made by a defendant before sentencing. And a most engrossing allocation it is, though longer than usual and a little hard to explain. It begins, as he tells the judge, in the fall, as the rain never stops falling and people are irritable, "during the period of the jokes and well before the deaths and mayhem."returnreturnThat's not entirely truthful. The jokes keep coming, along with the mayhem and murder. It begins …

Cecil Younger is in court and in trouble. He's an investigator for the public defender in Sitka, Alaska and an alcoholic who has sworn off the booze long enough to have a loving marriage to a marine biologist, provide a home to an autistic man who was once his legal ward, and raise a beloved daughter who, as Younger explains to the court, has been lost to her cell phone. This is the beginning of his allocution, a statement made by a defendant before sentencing. And a most engrossing allocation it is, though longer than usual and a little hard to explain. It begins, as he tells the judge, in the fall, as the rain never stops falling and people are irritable, "during the period of the jokes and well before the deaths and mayhem."returnreturnThat's not entirely truthful. The jokes keep coming, along with the mayhem and murder. It begins as Cecil meets with a client who wants to "seek employment with the city" â in other words, become a snitch. Since the client is pretty dim, as many of them are, Cecil makes sure to give him a copy of "Baby's First Felony," an illustrated self-help book with useful advice such as "don't wear the tennis shoes you stole to court when the guy you stole them from will be there to testify and his name is still written inside of them." Though the clientele Cecil works with is not very sophisticated, the method a criminal crew is using to smuggle drugs into the state is, and once an upstart rival disrupts the narcotics trade, things get complicated. By the time Cecil's daughter looks away from her phone long enough to get caught up in a dangerous situation, he knows there are police he can't trust, so he turns to his former clients and a group of forest-dwelling homeless men to set things right, using a plan so ramshackle and intricate it would make Rube Goldberg blush.returnreturnIn addition to a propulsive, almost hallucinogenic pace threaded with poetic touches of the Alaskan setting and the warmth of Cecil's affection for his family, Straley creates a large and colorful cast of characters infused with tenderness for the poor and the troubled, likely informed by the author's previous career with the public defender's office in Sitka. It's a big-hearted book and a wild ride. Though this is part of a series, there's no need to start at the beginning - though if that's your choice, good news: Soho is reissuing them all. returnreturnreposted from Reviewing the Evidence..