BIG BREATH IN

A sometime detective’s search for an adopted infant whose mother wants to reclaim him unfolds in ways that are strange even for Straley, who sets a high bar for strange.

Time was when Delphine Stockard served as her husband John’s partner in D & J Investigations, which helped criminal defense attorneys build their cases. But even before John was killed by a drunk driver, they dissolved the partnership, and Delphine, trained as a biologist, went back to her first love: studying the mental processes of large-brain animals. Now, she’s been stricken with pancreatic cancer, and the end is clearly upon her. In the meantime, though, John’s old friend Tom Foster, who still works as a PI, pleads with her to help him locate a 15-month-old whose mother sold him as a newborn to Tyler Dearborn, a self-described rancher who’s rumored to have pimped out endless young women and sold their offspring to finance his dreams of amassing a fortune in gold. Delphine’s not interested in bringing the repellant Tye to justice; she just wants to recover the three babies she’s told are traveling with him. She has no trouble locating Tye and his associate, the Babysitter, but neither of them will listen to reason, and the dying Delphine brings limited resources to the job of persuading them. This non-whodunit would already be unusual, even if it weren’t repeatedly interrupted by Delphine’s memories of her life before and during her marriage and long passages that provide more information about whales than anything you’ve read since Moby-Dick. The result—with a heroine based, as Straley notes in his closing acknowledgments, on his real-life wife—is, well, strange.

The real star here is the tranquil, hard-won meditations on mortality tucked into every crevice.