SHIP SHAPELY

The police call Les Quincy’s death an accident, and why shouldn’t they? Since the morning a year ago when the four lovely women he’d hired to sail his boat and share his bunk awoke to find him missing, there hasn’t even been any hard evidence that he’s dead. But the veteran skipper was much too far from Hawaii to have made it to shore, so either he unaccountably fell overboard in the middle of the night without waking anyone, or one or more of his five companions is lying about what happened to him. Les’s widow Edna, determined to get at the truth, persuades dashing shamus Gil Yates (Bluebeard’s Last Stand, 1998, etc.) to cut his usual exorbitant contingency fee to $200,000. So Gil packs his endless supply of malapropisms and goes in search of the five survivors of Les’s last voyage: sexy Kay, southern belle Prudence, nude model Sooshe, drug-connected Elizabeth, and Bible-college-student Ruth. The women, vivid stereotypes alike only in their attractiveness, continue to insist they have no idea how Les ended up in Davy Smith’s locker, but several of them seem unaccountably taken with Gil (“I like unthreatening men,” Ruth tells him), and his investigation threatens to turn into five rounds of chastely described coupling before he rolls up the case. Though Gil’s as charming as ever, the answer to this riddle isn’t likely to sweep you off your legs.