mother or grandparents. They are among the most difficult of legal cases for objectivity is lost. Emotions are dominant. I have not found that either gender is dominant in being irrational.
Cecil Younger, private investigator in Alaska, is working for Priscilla “Cilla” DeAngelo in a battle with Robert Sullivan II over the custody of Young Bob Sullivan that started while he was in the natal ward of the hospital in which he was born.
Priscilla is convinced that State Senator Wilfred Taylor, a friend of Young Bob’s grandfather Old Bob Sullivan, has corrupted the trial judge against her. She storms off to Juneau to confront him. Taylor ends up dead and Priscilla is charged with murder.
Three of the most colourful lawyers I have read about are involved in her defence.
Dickie Stein is Cecil’s friend. He graduated from Harvard Law at 19 and moved North “disdaining Wall Street to make a name for himself in frontier justice”. He often wears his maroon Harvard sweatshirt.
Harrison Teller also got his law degree at Harvard. He hates authority and “he would represent you with a depth of passion and vitriol that would garner thousands of dollars in contempt citations with each trial”. Cecil encounters Teller. He is “[A] big man in a heavy wool coat that could have been a buffalo robe”. He has a bushy beard and a wide brimmed felt hat.
Cecil cannot remember the name of the Associate Public Defender. He does remember meeting the APA in his office:
His hair had those dirty black horns from where he had been pulling at it all day in court. He was wearing a Blackhawks jersey and baggy black shorts. His tennis shoes were unlaced ….
I doubt I would trust any of the trio with a murder defence.
There is a powerful scene in which Younger accepts he will drown as he sinks down. He feels comforted by knowing “this time I would be the first on the scene and I would know more than the cops, even if I was dead”. When he is unexpectedly rescued he is disoriented.
Younger literally and figuratively stumbles into the investigation. He struggles to make sense of what has happened and is happening.
The setting is so physically different from Saskatchewan. Younger lives amidst the sea, trees and mountains. Only the isolation is the same.
Younger desperately wants to help Priscilla and her sister, Jane Marie, and Young Bob.
While Younger tries to puzzle his way through what is happening he has an amazing experience swimming near a quartet of humpback whales:
Rubbery white fins flashed in front of me. The shadow of something trailing bubbles the size of cantaloupes. The shadow moved slowly but with inexorable force, like a school bus rolling off a cliff. I could never see its entire length in this murky water, but only dim parts of the whole: a shifting of enormous curve and shadow.
Jane Marie is a whale scientist who uses imagination to try to gain abit of understanding of what whales tell each other.
She plays a recording of the whales:
Through the headphones I heard a chorus of sounds: squealing, creaking, and broad sweeping moans.
Younger describes the tape as eerie and beautiful.
While the portrayal of Alaska and life there is brilliant I found the plot somewhat disjointed. It is never going to be easy to describe a fierce custody dispute. Participants too often act illogically. I found it hard to follow the “why”. The senator’s death made it harder.
The conclusion was as dramatic as the opening. It is the middle I found slow going.
I consider The Music of What Happens a good book. I consider the previous two books in the series better.
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