A solid and entertaining mystery.
A Florida private investigator looks into a shady shipboard death in this fifth installment of a series.
About to turn 30 years old in 2008, Miami Jones is at a crossroads. His short-lived career in professional baseball brought him to Florida, far from his New England home; after retiring from the game, he earned a master’s in criminology and became a full-time investigator, as recounted in four previous books in this series. Now his friends and mentors want him to settle down: buy a house, purchase a car, and join the yacht club. Lenny Cox, Miami’s boss and mentor, is moving his detective agency to new offices, which has an air of permanency. Stay or leave? To Miami, property taxes mean loss of freedom, but there’s something to be said for having a home. Meanwhile, the agency gets a new case with a personal connection: Will Colfax, the businessman/skipper of a yacht in Bahamian waters, goes overboard, his body not found. Among the passengers is Ron Bennett, Miami’s friend and colleague, who comes under suspicion when it’s learned that his ex-wife, Mandy, was seeing Will. The case isn’t strong, but a prosecutor is looking for a quick win. Luckily for Ron, others who were aboard also have motives—a connection with embezzlement, for example—and shaky alibis. Further digging leads Miami to examine some suspicious shipping containers and Alec Meechan, yet another passenger, who owns a luxury-car dealership. Miami will have to weather tense confrontations and tragedy before the truth comes out. Stewart (The Final Tour, 2017, etc.) is an able mystery writer who orchestrates his tangled plot well. His descriptions of South Florida, judicial proceedings, and shipboard practices all have the ring of truth. Although new readers to the series may have some questions (why is the PI agency moving?), the novel works well as a stand-alone. Stewart’s characterization is strong, unstereotyped, and engaging, especially regarding Miami. His musings about friendship, home, right and wrong, and similar matters give the book a strong emotional anchor and subtly show his growth as a person.
A solid and entertaining mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9859455-9-6
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Jacaranda Drive
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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