Cold Storage, Alaska - John Straley

Cold Storage, Alaska

By John Straley

  • Release Date: 2014-02-04
  • Genre: Mysteries & Thrillers
Score: 4
4
From 76 Ratings

Description

An offbeat, often hilarious crime novel set in the sleepy Alaskan town of Cold Storage from the Shamus Award winning author of the Cecil Younger series.
 
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 at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the town is withering. 

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. But Clive doesn’t realize the trouble he’s bringing home. His 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 Clive’s arrival turn the whole place upside down?

Reviews

  • A Rare Gem

    5
    By Jandbg15
    Boy this is a wonderful book! It’s funny, serious, gruesome, beautifully conceived and written. It has a feeling about it that makes this city guy wish he could live in this broken down little town with all of its delightfully flawed residents. My highest praise for the rare book that kept me riveted to the feel-good end. I almost never regret reaching the end of a book. I did this time. Get it, read it, love it.
  • Cold Storage, cold narrative (plot?)

    2
    By 1minnesotagjrl
    I got to p. 162 (iPhone pages) and wondered why I was reading this. If there is a plot, it should be clear by this point; all I see here is life in a small Alaska town. I write adventure novels -- six published by New York publishers so far. (I add this because many of the ebooks I buy from Amazon are self- published and have had neither editing other than by the author, nor copyediting) -- so perhaps the kind of stories I write is part of my issue with this novel: It doesn't move with any speed at all. I give a novel about 40 pages to pull me in, but these pages are only 2-3 paragraphs long, so I read to pg. 162. I can't help reading like a professional writer, because I've been reading fiction that way since at least 1985). A really good book can draw me so I feel with the characters and sort of fall into the story. There are some of those in the forest of ebooks. Of the 70 or 80 ebooks I've read since January, maybe 10 were high interest and I bought one of those because it had a trade-book copy available. I could read that many because most of them are novellas, really, not full-size novels. (a widely accepted top word count for a novella is 40,000 words, bottom count varies from 14,000 -15,000words) If I had gotten interested in any of the characters though . . . ..

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