Scone Island

June 4, 2012
Ramsey’s engaging eighth Ike Schwartz mystery (after 2011’s Rogue) takes the ex-CIA agent turned smalltown sheriff of Picketsville, Va., and his university president fiancée, Ruth Dennis, to Maine’s Scone Island for a vacation. With Ruth still recovering from her near-fatal hit-and-run car accident, Ike is determined to guarantee peace, quiet, and wine-induced relaxation. Unfortunately, a recent death on the island has the locals asking Ike for advice and Ruth on the warpath. When old CIA pal Charlie Garland tries to get in touch, Ike issues a communications blackout to family, friends, and colleagues, knowing a call from Charlie always leads to heart-stopping trouble. Silence, however, is not golden but stained red when Ike and Charlie’s former allies start turning up dead across the country. Surefooted prose speeds this well-told tale of greed and betrayal among the nation’s covert elite. Ruth and Ike’s intellectual bickering will amuse literary and history buffs.

July 15, 2012
An eagerly awaited vacation on a quiet Maine island becomes a nightmare for a former CIA agent and his significant other. Ike Schwartz is currently the sheriff of Picketsville, Va., where his longtime love, university president Ruth Dennis, is recovering from a nasty incident that put her in a coma. Both of them manifestly need some peace. So when Ruth inherits her aunt's house on Scone Island, they sneak off for some R&R. Four miles off the Maine coast, Scone has no electricity, phone service or even reliable water. But it does have a recent death, the suspicious fall from a cliff of mystery man Harmon Staley. While Ike is looking into the death of Staley, who was once his colleague, another of his old pals from the CIA is desperately seeking him. Charlie Garland, cut out of a secret operation by his boss, has learned that someone is killing CIA agents who once had worked on several cases with Ike, and he's convinced that Ike is next on the list. After snooping around on Scone and a nearby uninhabited island once used by the Coast Guard, Ike thinks he's found the motive for Staley's murder. Now he and Ruth may have to fight a pitched battle against unknown enemies from his past to survive. The latest mystery-thriller for Ike (Rogue, 2011, etc.) provides all the fast-paced action and danger readers have come to expect.

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