Deadly Ruse

September 8, 2014
The relationship between former Marine Mac McClellan, who’s working on earning his PI license, and his girlfriend, Kate Bell, is at stake in Helms’s entertaining sequel to 2013’s Deadly Catch. On their way home from the movie theater in St. George, Fla., Kate is shocked to spot her old boyfriend Wes Harrison, who supposedly drowned with two other friends in a boating accident years earlier. While the face looks different, the mismatched blue-and-brown eyes are unmistakable. The skeptical Mac reluctantly agrees to investigate, and soon discovers that Wes’s backstory and that of his friends don’t add up. After Wes shows up in the FBI’s National Crime database as Weston Russell Harrison, on which he’s listed as the leader of a gang of upper middle-class teens in California, Mac dives into the case. Helms expertly steers the elaborate plot even as the stolen identities, suspicious missionaries, and diamond smuggling stretch credulity. Agent: Fred Tribuzzo, Rudy Agency.

October 15, 2014
While he's working toward his private eye's license, ex-Marine Mac McClellan takes on a case to oblige his girlfriend after she sees a ghost.St. George is one of those Florida panhandle towns where everyone's known everyone else since childhood. So it shouldn't be all that surprising when Kate Bell, who works in Gillman's Marina, gets a glimpse of her old boyfriend, Wes Harrison-except that Wes drowned back in 1997 along with his buddies Eric Kohler and Robert Ramey. After Kate is done fainting, Mac is done reasoning with her, and the couple is done with the cold-shoulder tango, Mac assures Kate that he believes her and vows to get to the bottom of the mystery. And there's quite a bit to get to the bottom of, since it turns out that two of the three drowning victims were in love with each other, and the identity of one of them seems to have been assumed by an ex-con with an impressive rap sheet. The closer Mac looks into the past, the less he believes it. Soon he's wondering if Eric's sister, pilot Rachel Todd, really died a few months after her brother in a Latin American crash from which no bodies were ever recovered. The trail to the truth leads through a stash of conflict diamonds, a drug bust and the Palmetto Royale Casino and Spa, where Mac finds wild child Dakota Owens, the cousin of his cop buddy Sgt. J.D. Owens, working as a blackjack dealer. There's never much doubt about whodunit; given the variety of felonies, readers are more likely to wonder who's on first. Studly Mac (Deadly Catch, 2013) and the bevy of available beauties who swarm around him should provide red meat for fans who still miss Travis McGee.

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September 15, 2014
Mac McClellan, retired marine, would like to drowse in the Florida sun, catch his dinner off the back of his boat, and wonder what to do with himself. His idea of the lush life is to take his girlfriend, Kate, to a movie, and that's where things turn perilous. In a spooky moment that will resonate with many readers, Kate spots an old boyfriend outside the theater. Problem is, he's been dead 12 years. She's so upset that Mac begins an inquiry designed to bury the corpse once and for all. What he finds leads him into a complex world of thievery and murder that some might find too complex and overpopulated with scumbags. They'd say with Mac, I needed Watson, IBM's supercomputer, to unscramble this mess. Things get so tangled we lose sight of the hook: the corpse that won't lie down. But hang on. The finale, in a luxury hotel, brings everything right. And Mac, who loves his Dewar's, may have a job in the sequel. He's a natural PI.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)