No Way to Die

August 19, 2019
In Easley’s satisfying seventh mystery featuring genial Oregon attorney Cal Claxton (after 2018’s Moving Targets), Cal and his daughter, Claire, who has a postdoctoral position at Harvard in environmental science, are fishing in Oregon’s Millicoma River when they discover the body of fellow fisherman Howard Coleman, his hands and feet bound with steel cable. Two days later, Cal meets Aurora “Rori” Dennison, the owner of the Coffee and Subversion bookshop, who describes the dead man as “a jailhouse snitch.” Coleman’s false testimony helped convict her 16-year-old grandson, Kevin Sanders, of the murder of nasty Sonny Jensen four years earlier and send the boy to prison for life without parole. Soon after Cal agrees to reexamine Kevin’s case, he and Claire are risking their lives in pursuit of the killers of both Jensen and Coleman. Easley creates authentic characters and relationships, and his eloquent descriptions of the Oregon wilderness are sublime. This well-plotted, character-driven series just keeps getting better.

September 15, 2019
Easley sets his seventh Cal Claxton mystery in his hero's stomping ground?the dramatically beautiful Oregon coast?and he trots out his standard bad guys: greedy developers eager to tear up the landscape in pursuit of big bucks. As in the earlier novels, the developers are doing just fine until they cross onetime L.A. prosecutor Claxton. The narrative begins classically off the point: a young man is wrongly convicted of the murder of an area businessman, and his grandmother has the luck to encounter Claxton and ask for his help. The murder, Claxton learns, was just a business decision, nothing personal: the victim was slowing down the greedheads. But just as we're ready to think "same old," Easley introduces some startling twists. Readers might wish a speedier pace to the narrative, but they'll still enjoy immersing themselves in Claxton's enviable world of fly-fishing, cappuccino, craft beers, and surfing, not to mention learning what "woolly bugger" and "sweeping oxbow" mean. Amiable mystery fare, reminiscent of the late William G. Tapply's Brady Coyne series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)