An intriguing but overly detailed story of avarice and crime.
In his debut mystery, Grant mines a culture of retirees living the good life on an isolated island in southwest Florida.
The novel opens in the village of Saint James City on tiny Pine Island near Florida’s western coast. This is no Margaritaville; in fact, the average age is well north of 60. There are no beaches here, and most people are out of the restaurants and bars and into their beds by 11 p.m. The narrator is retired banker Jim Story, who’s happily married to retired banker Jill. Between their infrequent travels and visits to grandchildren, they enjoy a relaxed lifestyle of seafood dinners, afternoon cocktails with friends and lots of fishing. However, their peaceful existence is disturbed when one of Story’s former banking colleagues, Javier Hernandez, comes to visit, goes fishing on a boat and is later found dead—shot between the eyes. It turns out that Javier was a descendant of a former Spanish police officer who served in Cuba in the early 20th century, and his inexplicable murder sets Story on a quest to find connections between American political and financial interests in Cuba, a century-old war crime, Spanish peacekeepers and a cache of gold. As he digs deeper into the histories of wealthy and powerful figures, however, he makes dangerous enemies. The Storys eventually enlist the help of a retired military officer, Steve Fairchild, and his wife in identifying and hunting down the killer. All ends well back in St. James City, and the residents drink and dance in celebration of a crime solved. However, the novel’s pace is as leisurely as a group of seniors after midnight; the plot meanders through detours and side roads and, as a result, loses steam along the way. It devotes many pages to tangential topics, such as an involved description of Salamanca, Spain; techniques for trimming palm trees; and the different flavors of Vienna sausages. Some of these deviations add color and context, but the dilatory pace and lackadaisical point of view reduce the impact of a story set in motion by a shocking murder.
An intriguing but overly detailed story of avarice and crime.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484847985
Page Count: 432
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the...
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is pushed toward retirement.
It’s a great relief for Inspector Gamache to get out of the office and head for Three Pines to help therapist-turned-bookseller Myrna find out why her friend Constance Pineault didn’t turn up for Christmas. Except for Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s staff has been gutted by Chief Superintendent Francoeur. Gamache’s decisions have been mostly ignored and bets placed on how soon he’ll admit redundancy and retire. Even worse, a recent tragedy (The Beautiful Mystery, 2012, etc.) has led his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to transfer out of Gamache’s department, fall sway to prescription drugs and hold his former boss in contempt. En route to Three Pines, Gamache happens upon a fatality at the Champlain Bridge and agrees to handle the details. But this case takes a back seat to the disappearance of Constance when she turns up dead in her home. Myrna confides Constance’s secret: As the last surviving Ouellet quintuplet, she’d spent her adult years craving privacy after the national publicity surrounding the birth of the five sisters had turned them into daily newspaper fodder. Why would anyone want to murder this reclusive woman of 79? The answer is developed through clues worthy of Agatha Christie that Gamache interprets while dealing with the dismemberment of his homicide department by Francoeur, who’s been plotting a major insult to Canadian government for 30 years. Matters come to a head when Gamache and the one Sûreté chief still loyal to him and her husband, a computer whiz, are tracked to Three Pines, where Beauvoir awaits, gun in hand.
Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the real-life Dionne family debacle of the 1940s. But it’s Three Pines, with its quirky tenants, resident duck and luminous insights into trust and friendship, that will hook readers and keep them hooked.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-65547-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
The relaxed and reigning king of beach music, who most recently told Tales From Margaritaville (1989), tries his hand at a relaxed and rambling novel. It's about seaplanes, a pretty girl, a vanished rock star, the curse of jet skis, a magic scepter, disrupters of paradise, and conch burgers. Joe Merchant, of the title, is the missing, presumed dead rock star whose sister Trevor Kane has returned to Florida to enlist her old lover Frank Bama to check out rumors of Merchant's survival. Trevor left Frank, a Vietnam vet who would rather fly than get serious, years ago because he seemed to love his ancient seaplane more than he loved her. Frank's doughty seaplane, however, is just what she needs to go in search of someone named Desdemona, who might be somewhere in the Caribbean. There is a Desdemona, and she does have a psychic link to the missing musician. She's been getting extrasensory messages for months. Also on the trail of Mr. Merchant and Desdemona are trash journalist Rudy Breno and one- armed, archvillainous soldier-of-fortune Colonel Cairo. Colonel Cairo is obsessed with the restoration of his missing arm, a task requiring a missing crystal. Desdemona might know something about that. The searches are Florida-intense, which is to say that there is plenty of time for subplots about Frank's chum who has been blowing up the jet skis that make paradise too noisy, and about a coldblooded killer with eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids who's not, after all, a subplot. So laid-back and rambling it's perilously close to sloppy, but Buffett's considerable charms as a performer and goof-off artist keep things afloat. The uninitiated may be baffled; his fans will be enchanted.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-196296-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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