John Straley Books in Order

If you want the main Alaska mystery series: The Woman Who Married a Bear → The Curious Eat Themselves → The Music of What Happens
If you want later Cecil with bigger family stakes: Baby's First Felony → So Far and Good
If you want the Cold Storage books: The Big Both Ways → Cold Storage, Alaska → What Is Time to a Pig? → Blown by the Same Wind
If you want a standalone first: Big Breath In
If you want Straley the poet: The Rising and the Rain

John Straley was born in Redwood City, California, in 1953. He spent much of his childhood in the Seattle area, then went to high school in New York City. Before writing became his work, he trained as a horseshoer and learned the kind of practical jobs that later gave his fiction its worn, lived-in feel.

He studied literature at the University of Washington. During those years he spent summers in north central Washington as a wrangler, horseshoer, mill worker, and trail crew foreman. The outdoor work stayed with him. His books rarely treat landscape as scenery. Weather, distance, and labor always matter.

Then Alaska changed everything.

Straley married Janice Morrison Straley, a marine biologist, and followed her to Sitka in 1977. In Alaska he worked different jobs before becoming an investigator, and he eventually spent decades with the Alaska Public Defender Agency. That work put him close to people in trouble, to courtroom aftermath, and to the everyday mix of damage, absurdity, and endurance that would become central to his novels.

He also grew up in a house full of detective fiction. Straley has said that place is often where a story starts for him, and that makes sense once you read him. After a run of rejections, The Woman Who Married a Bear was published in 1992 and introduced Sitka investigator Cecil Younger. The book won the Shamus Award for best first mystery and gave Straley the series character most readers still know him for.

Cecil came back in The Curious Eat Themselves, The Music of What Happens, Death and the Language of Happiness, The Angels Will Not Care, and Cold Water Burning. These are crime novels, but they are also books about class, loneliness, stubborn loyalty, and small-town memory. Readers tend to like Cecil because he is not slick or glamorous. He is funny, broke, humane, and often in over his head. The Music of What Happens also won the Spotted Owl Award.

Straley has never written Alaska as postcard country.

He has never stayed in one lane, either. The Big Both Ways opens into a 1930s adventure along the Inside Passage, while Cold Storage, Alaska, What Is Time to a Pig?, and Blown by the Same Wind build a rough, odd, funny series around a tiny fishing town. The books shift in time and tone, but they keep returning to the same things: weather, work, crime, community, and the trouble people drag home with them.

Poetry matters to him, too. He has published five books of poetry, including The Rising and the Rain, and the poet's eye shows up all through his prose. He notices ravens, tides, hot springs, rusting docks, and the way a joke can sit right next to grief. In 2006 he was named Alaska's Writer Laureate, a role he held through 2008, and he later received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

He returned to Cecil after a long gap with Baby's First Felony and So Far and Good, two later novels that bring more family pressure and consequence into the series. In 2024 he published Big Breath In, a standalone about a retired marine biologist named Delphine who gets pulled back toward investigative work when a child is in danger. Straley retired from the Alaska Public Defender Agency in 2017. He and Jan moved to Carmel, California, in 2022 to be closer to family and healthcare after more than four decades in Sitka. Even now, he reads like a writer shaped by Southeast Alaska, its working towns, and its hard weather.