Baby’s First Felony by John Straley
Genre: mystery/crime
Publisher: Soho Crime
Publication Date: 2018
Summary
Cecil Younger, a criminal defense investigator, is no stranger to rough characters. Heck, the majority of the public defender’s clients are “rough”: alcoholics, drug users, petty criminals, but Cecil likes them. Well, most of them. A long-dry alcoholic, he’s built a nice life with his researcher wife Jane Marie (who’s working on a grant proposal and stressed about their daughter); his brother with Asperger’s Todd (who’s learning jokes as therapy); and his teen daughter Blossom, who’s taken to dyeing her hair, calling her parents by their first names, and losing herself in her phone. A young teen girl has disappeared, with drugs as a possible factor, and Jane Marie is worried about Blossom and her BFF, Emily (now known as Thistle). He works for a public defender, David, who’s written a self-help guide of do’s and don’ts for more, uh, intellectually challenged criminals, titled Baby’s First Felony.
When Sherrie, a returning client, begs Cecil to find evidence she says will clear her of criminal charges, he does it . . . and lives to regret this decision.
The evidence is $50K, found in a dubious location frequented by druggies and shady deals, and Cecil’s got it now. But things do awry: that’s what happens when you add meth-heads with guns, drug-stuffed frozen fish, various dirty cops and crooked business people, and a bloody killing.
Cecil wants nothing to do with Sherrie’s money (if it’s even hers). But then his young teen daughter Blossom is abducted to secure his cooperation with the criminal behind the drug deals. Suspecting police involvement, Cecil turns to a motley crew of former clients to aid his rescue of Blossom. Not such a great idea. Get a bunch of ex-cons, add a liberal dose of drugs and alcohol and non-stop rain, and you never know what might happen.
My thoughts
This is seventh in the Cecil Younger series. Though I haven’t read any of the others, this book works as a standalone.
What didn’t work for me:
There were a lot of things I enjoyed about the book, but somehow I was disappointed. I don’t know why. That frustrates me, as this book had many of the elements that I normally enjoy. I had problems reading it and contemplated not finishing it. I hate saying that.
Maybe it wasn’t a good fit for me, or I wasn’t a good fit for the book. Sometimes that just happens.
What worked for me:
Cecil’s narrative tone is wry and often humorous.
Here are two quotes that I enjoyed:
Your Honors, Dashiell Hammett once wrote, “The cheaper the hood, the gaudier the patter,” but in my experience, the cheaper the hood, and the more excited they are, the more frequently they use the word “fuck.”
Baby’s First Felony, page 86
With bears and with meth heads with guns, the basic rule is this: don’t seem like food, and don’t challenge them to a fight. Make it seem like you are just too much trouble to kill.
Baby’s First Felony, page 87
Minor characters were well-rounded.
No spoilers. Sherrie surprised me, as did Gudger, when they showed different aspects of their personalities. Though Sherrie might be a hardened woman, she’s capable of sorrow for a vulnerable person. Though Gudger is an alcoholic inebriate, “institutionalized”, when given the right environment, he thrives.
Cecil’s view of the clients is realistic.
Straley spent several decades as a criminal defense investigator, and that experience shows. Cecil’s realistic about the work of a public defender and their clients. While he has compassion for their situations, he’s not sentimental, optimistic, or soft on crime. Most are guilty. Most will continue to do drugs, shoplift, assault, whatever, no matter how harshly the legal system penalizes them. Some, like Sherrie, have been so mistreated their entire lives that they cannot accept kindness, even genuine kindness. Others, like Cecil’s pal Gudger, are homeless and any roof, even a jailhouse roof, is preferable. All will justify their crimes:
The hardest lesson for a young public defender to learn is that your clients, even in the midst of doing something completely antisocial, violent or self-destructive, feel justified
Baby’s First Felony, page 174
My final thoughts:
I really struggled with this book. As I said earlier, I can’t quite figure out why. I think it might be a case of a mismatch between reader and book. Straley knows how to tell a good story, though, and fans of his might really enjoy this. As I wrote in my review of I am Lemonade Lucy!, sometimes books with a more humorous tone just don’t work for me.
Bonus writing tip:
If you have an unreliable narrator, put a spin on it.
Throughout the book, Cecil addresses the sentencing panel who will determine how much prison time he will receive for his crime. (This isn’t a spoiler; the device is clear from page one.) At one particularly low point, he falls off the wagon, drinks, and lands in a heap of trouble. As he looks back in hindsight, he is aware of being unreliable as a narrator:
From this point on, Your Honors, I was in the country of painful rage, everything I say here cannot be said to be true, because at that point my mind was not in alignment with accurate recollection but only with finding our girl. Baby’s First Felony, page 149
I particularly liked this because it not only works with Cecil’s character (especially his weaknesses) but because it pushes the story forward (helping to explain why a normally level-headed man engages in a highly unorthodox rescue attempt). It also acknowledges a truth: memory is not reliable and is often distorted by emotions, motivations, and later events. But it’s also interesting that Cecil has not been an unreliable narrator until this point in the novel. It takes a big, dramatic event to push him into unreliability. That’s different from books where the narrator is unreliable from the start.
Having an unreliable narrator is almost cliched in certain genres. So if you do use that trope, make your unreliable narrator’s unreliability work with his/her character, push the story forward, and consider making it temporary.
This book review appears on Goodreads, Bookbub, and Amazon.
Talk to me! What do you think?