The Music of What Happens

Starred review from January 29, 1996
After this case, Xanax-popping PI Cecil Younger of Sitka, Alaska, may make it a rule never to work for friends. Priscilla DeAngelo recruits him to help her in a bitter custody battle over her son. In no time, Cecil confronts her ex and finds himself flat on the pavement of a Seattle parking lot. Back in Juneau, Priscilla confronts Senator Wilfred Taylor, whom she suspects of conspiring to keep her son away from her, and the senator ends up dead in the stairwell. With Priscilla under arrest for murder, Cecil finds himself not only working on the custody case but reacquainting himself with an old flame, Priscilla's sister, Jane Marie, and locking horns with legendary defense attorney Harrison Teller, who seems to have a finger in every pie. A web of subplots adds to the depth of a story that encompasses possible organized crime, senatorial paper shredding and obsessive love. By its conclusion, the whirlwind ride leaves the reader gasping for breath, as Shamus Award-winning Straley (The Woman Who Married a Bear) tells a dark story illuminated by the wild vigor of both the Alaskan landscape and his own writing.