DANGEROUS GAMES

Already wanted for questioning by the British police in a murder inquiry, languidly parasitic American Jim Rush is passing the time on the Caribbean island of St. Elena with his wealthy lover, Jane Logan, and her tedious circle of friends when his travel-folder paradise is crashed by three troubling new acquaintances. He runs into the first, celebrity photographer Martin Peters, one step ahead of a gunshot in an empty house he's gone exploring. The other two, Mike Rooney and his buddy Drew, are selling a sailboat, or maybe (as Martin darkly hints) running guns; when they let it slip that they're secretly trying to salvage a centuries-old treasure from a sunken ship, Jim allows them to draw him into their scheme as a possible financier to be fleeced, confident that he can keep one step ahead of them—and secure in the knowledge that he has no money to be swindled out of. He doesn't count on getting mixed up in another murder that will place him in danger from his new friends, his despised old acquaintances, and the local police, requiring all his wits—and his aristocratic connections—to survive with his upper lip intact. All winks, sidewise glances, and sly hints. Grant-Adamson (Too Many Questions, 1991, etc.) makes Patricia Highsmith's stories about that equally plausible scoundrel Tom Ripley seem positively boisterous.