The Case of the Black Pearl

May 12, 2014
This mildly diverting series opener from Anderson (Picture Her Dead and seven other Rhona MacLeod crime novels) introduces Patrick de Courvoisier, an Englishman with a murky past who lives aboard a converted gunboat in the French resort town of Cannes, where he offers his services as a low-key, laid-back “fixer.” When Patrick agrees to look for Camille Ager’s missing sister, actress Angele Valette, who vanished along with a valuable black pearl, he unwittingly steps back into the shadows of his former mysterious career, into a world populated by temptresses and well-connected Russian mobsters, as well as by liars and crooked cops. The stakes become deadly with Patrick’s discovery of a beautiful woman drowned in the bathtub on his boat. Anderson uses her setting with a certain amount of skill, but readers should be prepared for lackluster language and stock characters.