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 dreamsâbut 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.
John Straley was born in 1953, the youngest of five children. He received a BA in English and a certificate of completion in horseshoeing. He enjoys jokes and a wide variety of literature and music. He is the Shamus Awardâwinning author of The Curious Eat Themselves and The Woman Who Married a Bear and was appointed the Writer Laureate of Alaska in 2006. Straley lives with his wife, Jan, a prominent whale biologist, in a bright green house on the beach in Sitka, Alaska, where he works as a criminal defense investigator by day and sleeps, writes, and plays with his band, the Big Fat Babies, whenever he can.
Barry Press has been an active professional actor, director, and teacher for over thirty-five years. He has performed off Broadway and at numerous regional theaters from Alaska to Florida. He is founder and artistic director of Living Literature, a Rhode Islandâbased literacy program.