The Off-Islander

August 5, 2019
Boston PI Andy Roark, the hero of Colt’s entertaining debut and series launch, came back from Vietnam with serious PTSD and a simple lesson: you just had to kill the people who were trying to kill you. Decades later, he sits in his office, reading Raymond Chandler and doing routine, minimally interesting investigations. Then his friend Danny Sullivan, a mobbed-up lawyer, puts him on the case of tracking down Charles Hammond, the long-skipped father of a wealthy, scheming beauty, Deborah Swift, who wants to make sure that the missing man had no secrets that would hurt her husband’s accelerating political career. By skill and intuition, Andy follows the trail from Cape Cod to Nantucket, where an apparently guileless and harmless old hippy might be Hammond. Or not. But Andy isn’t the only one looking for Hammond. Like Philip Marlowe—or Robert Parker’s Spenser—Andy has a sharp eye for telling detail and male haberdashery. The resulting tale may not be stunningly original, but those who enjoy newish reworkings of classic PI tropes will be satisfied. Agent: Cynthia Manson, Cynthia Manson Literary.

Hard-boiled private eye Andy Roark has an accent that displays his South Boston roots, but his years around military personnel have given his voice a hint of the American South. Bringing the two speech patterns together sounds challenging, but narrator Keith Sellon-Wright manages to pull it off. Roark is on assignment, tracking down a father who abandoned his family. There are many suspenseful moments in this story, which is told in the first person. Wright effectively portrays Roark, who is streetwise, coping with PTSD, likable, and capable. This murder mystery, set on Nantucket in the 1980s, is the first in a new series, and Andy Roark is a fine addition to the pantheon of fictional detectives. D.L.G. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine