The Curious Eat Themselves — John Straley

"No one really hires me to find the truth. They hire me to imagine their innocence." Cecil Younger is a defense investigator working out of Sitka, in the Alaskan coastal archipelago. In this landscape of cold mists and rain, Younger shares a house with an autistic man and a Labrador retriever, and walks a narrow line between the truth and what his clients pay him to find....

Though most of Younger's clients are defendants, this one is the victim of a crime. Louise Root wants Younger to break through corporate cover-ups and police apathy to find evidence against the man who raped her in an isolated mining camp. But before she is ready to tell him the details of the assault, her body is found in a salmon run, throat slashed.

Suddenly Younger's case is as thick and murky as an oil tanker spill--and its dark and deadly stain is beginning to spread....