The Sea Detective

October 8, 2012
Douglas-Home’s well-executed first novel offers an original hook, an increasingly rare occurrence in the ever-more-crowded mystery field. Cal McGill, of Edinburgh’s Flotsam and Jetsam Investigations, assists environmental groups by using wind speed and ocean current data to backtrack pollution to its source. Why seven severed feet have washed ashore on North America’s West Coast during a 15-month period intrigues McGill, but he eventually gets a more pressing case involving an Indian girl, Preeti, sold by her family into prostitution at 13 for 60,000 rupees, a record amount for her impoverished village near Mumbai. Three years after Preeti is taken out to sea in a boat and dumped overboard to drown, her murder comes to McGill’s attention. Douglas-Home poignantly portrays the degradation of Preeti and her fellow child prostitutes, while McGill makes a nicely understated hero, well positioned to sustain a series. Agent: Maggie Pearlstine, Maggie Pearlstine Associates.

December 1, 2012
Caladh McGill, of Edinburgh, Scotland, runs Flotsam and Jetsam Investigations, which helps environmental organizations track oil spills, disasters involving fishing nets, and the like. He's an expert on currents and other phenomena that affect how things get from one point in the ocean to another, and he's spent years trying to find the body of his grandfather, who died at sea during WWII. He also likes to make political statements by planting flowers on the properties of politicians. Not the sort of fella you'd expect to find headlining a crime novel, but here he is, nevertheless, trying to help a young woman find out what happened to her friend, whose body was pulled out of the ocean. This is not your traditional amateur-sleuth story. Cal and the young woman don't even meet until we're about two-thirds through the book. The bulk of the story is taken up by illicit flower planting and Cal's search for his grandfather's final resting place. Still, by the end, we've come to see the engaging Cal as a viable lead for an ecocrime series. Quirky but appealing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)