THE DEADLY ACKEE

by Joan Hadley ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 1988

Hadley's second generation-gap mystery (following last year's mildly diverting The Night-Blooming Cereus)--here, with 61-year-old retired florist Theo Bloomer chaperoning college-age niece Dorrie and a six-pack of unattractively shrill students, this time at a snazzy Jamaica villa during Easter break. There are Bitsy, who used to be engaged to Trey until she found him prancing around in her silk underwear; Trey's lusty twin Mary Margaret, the talk of Jamaica for limbo-ing in her underwear; Biff, Dorrie's straying-eye fiancÉ, who's taking nude pictures of the voluptuous Mary Margaret sunning herself; and his chum, Sandy, whose money comes on loan from his rich friends, sometimes--and sometimes, like here, from a fake kidnapping blithely co-engineered with M.M. to defraud her daddykins out of a few bucks, just for funnsies, you understand. (It's that kind of a book: Connecticut lockjaw satire recounted one notch higher than a screech, making chalk on a blackboard sound soothing.) Midbook another plot creeps in: villa pool-boy Eli is really an undercover cop staking out neighbor D'Orsini, a Count, a yachtsman, a patÉ eater, a gigolo (platonic, though), a drag-runner. Soon Eli is doing the dead-man's float in the villa pool, a victim of a rum punch laced with deadly fruit poison. Whodunit? This group hardly cares; they're too busy one-upping each other. But eventually Uncle Theo puts it all together--the crooked cop, the cocaine, and the ransom messages relayed from Connecticut by Dorrie's abrasive mom Nadine. Some funny bits, but heavy-handed and exceedingly wearing. Enough glibness for a half-hour sitcom; too much for a novel.

Pub Date: March 22, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION