ROGUE'S REGATTA

Whatever happened to “Congratulations, son”? Minutes after Hunter Worthington III has qualified for the Olympics by sailing to victory in a Newport regatta, Channel 3 reporter Michael Carolina catches the young man being slapped in the face by his own father, then the next morning finds Hunter III hanging from the yardarm of one of the old man’s yachts, with Dad a likely suspect. Michael’s not only under pressure from the cops to turn over evidence about the quarrel (which he doesn’t have), but distracted by the unwelcome appearance of his own father, a sozzled gambler, on the doorstep he shares with rookie p.i. Carla Tattaglia. So he takes a long time to notice that there’s a reason Carla isn’t talking much about her first big client. It’s Hunter Worthington Jr., of course, and although he joins his unsavory mouthpiece in coldly maintaining his innocence, his eye-popping family history will take Michael and Carla, working very much at odds with each other, a long way from the blandly moneyed world of the regatta. There’ll be repeated trips to the Porcelain God, where the nicest bartenders are kind enough to tell you just what they did to the drink they’re serving you; a whisper of pornography scandals from 30 years ago; and a pair of female stalkers who seem intent on destroying the Worthingtons, if the family can’t manage to finish the job themselves. Briody leaves behind the criminal monkeyshines of Michael’s first three adventures (Rogue’s Wager, 1997, etc.) for his richest, most tightly plotted case yet.