SNIPE HUNT

The Pearlies of Pearlie Beach, a North Carolina resort, seem content to let the sea keep its treasures. Then the corpse of a

WWII Navy frogman surfaces, complete with a bucketful of Confederate gold and a fishing knife stuck into his ribs. Did someone kill for sunken treasure 50 years ago? Inez Pearlie fears that the corpse might be her nephew Carl Chavis, who disappeared in 1942. She asks Professor Simon Shaw, who is vacationing locally, to put his expertise as a "forensic historian" to use. Although burned out from solving a previous historic murder (Simon Said, 1997) and busy "not dating" a police lawyer, Shaw nonetheless agrees. Sure enough, those were Pearlies that were Chavis’s eyes, and Shaw is soon caught up in a past that washes over the present. Half of Pearlie Beach is related to Chavis—and everybody has something to hide. An elderly, wealthy colonel pretends not to recognize an old photograph of Chavis. Meanwhile, Shaw meets a scuba-diving clergywoman related to a pilot who disappeared about the same time as Chavis, apparently while patrolling for German submarines; two Pearlies make nocturnal runs in a fishing boat with high-tech sonar but no lights; one Pearlie uses a shotgun to warn children away from his private beach. And even the yellowed magazines another Pearlie insulates his bathroom with strike Shaw as sinister. An intricate, well-constructed story that takes advantage of genuinely interesting facts about the North Carolina coast,

shipwrecks, and two wars. If only Shaw’s whining and romancing were half as compelling.