John Straley – författare

Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you''re Zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity in the mid-twentieth century, at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the population is shrinking every day.

Clive "the Milkman" McCahon returns to his tiny Alaska hometown after a seven-year jail stint for dealing coke. He has a lot to make up to his younger brother, Miles, who has dutifully been taking care of their ailing mother—and, really, all of Cold Storage. Miles is a physician''s assistant and the closest thing to a doctor this side of Sitka. But Clive doesn''t realize the trouble he''s bringing home. He''s reformed now, and his dream is to open a bar-slash-church (a Cold Storage ordinance requires there to be as many churches in town as there are bars). Clive''s vengeful old business partner is hot on his heels, a stick-in-the-mud state trooper is dying to bust Clive for narcotics, and, to complicate everything, Clive might be going insane—lately, he''s been hearing animals talking to him. Will his arrival in Cold Storage be a breath of fresh air for the sleepy, depopulated town, or will it turn the whole place upside-down?

John Straley brings his storytelling abilities to a new level in this completely original period crime story.

It''s 1935, and Slip Wilson, rattled by the gruesome accidental death of a coworker, has quit his job at a logging camp, hoping to make a clean start in Seattle. But along the way he rescues a woman and her young niece from their car in a ditch, and his life takes a hard turn. The woman, Ellie Hobbes, is an anarchist with big dreams—but first, she has to take care of that pesky dead body in the trunk of her car.

So begins the action that will take Slip, Ellie, her niece, and her noisy yellow bird on a thrilling adventure up the Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska.