The Woman Who Married A Bear is the first of the Cecil Younger novels, written by John Straley. In the preface, the author says that he once heard of a woman who married a bear, and he believed it.
Cecil Younger is the son of a well-known judge in Alaska, but he’s a failure. He has a serious alcohol problem and a wanderlust; in this introduction to the character, he is still mourning his father, who has recently died, as well as mourning the loss of a romance and his six-month’s-long sobriety. After working for – and being fired from – the public defender’s office in Alaska as an investigator, Younger advertises his own investigation services. A Native woman living in an assisted living facility hires him to find out the truth behind her son’s death. She knows the official version – that a mentally unstable man whom her son hired to help with hunting trips that her son guided killed him – but she wants to know the truth.
This story, set in the early 1990s, has everything I want in a mystery. An imperfect investigator/detective (I’m looking at you, Tess Monaghan and, to a lesser extent, Guido Brunetti) who has little regard for the system under which justice is dispensed, even when they work within it. But Straley also brings a mythological element – the possibility that, as you may have guessed, a woman married a bear – that elevates the story to a mystical plane which I seek in fantasy and science fiction more often than in thrillers. The combination, in Straley’s hands, is potent. I look forward to digging into the second book, and hope that Younger takes his time to become a better man.
March 27, 2020