An original mystery with an acute sense of
place and plenty of wry humor, Fogland
Point by Doug Burgess (Poisoned
Pen Press, 2018) incorporates small town quirks, family loyalties, gender
politics, and New England coastal history into a highly readable book.
David Hazard returns to his hometown on a
peninsula jutting out from the edge of Rhode Island, overlooking the Atlantic
Ocean. (It used to be part of Massachusetts but Massachusetts didn’t want it.)
He’s responding to a panicky telephone call from his grandmother that
references blood everywhere and a body. She doesn’t pick up his return call and
the friends that look out for her aren’t answering their telephones either.
When he arrives, typical of those afflicted with Alzheimer’s, his grandmother
has no recollection of her message or blood or a body.
The next-door neighbor who serves as his
grandmother’s unofficial guardian hasn’t brought the evening meal yet so David
checks on her to find her dead on her kitchen floor, the apparent victim of a broken
shelf of cookware and a cast-iron skillet to the head. He calls the police and
the wheels of bureaucracy begin to turn.
With her primary caretaker gone, David agrees
to stay with his grandmother for a while until something else can be worked
out. The local law enforcement become suspicious of the neighbor’s cause of
death and begin to ask questions. David’s grandmother claims to have seen a
vehicle belonging to a new town resident outside at the appropriate time but
her memory is so unreliable no one is sure what she actually did see.
Then another death occurs, this one
unquestionably a homicide, and a full-fledged investigation into events, both
past and present begin.
Among the cast of decidedly eccentric
characters, my favorite is the kitchen poltergeist who washes dishes and leaves
sandwiches on the table. At one point David says he’d pay the poltergeist for
its work if he could figure out how. Not a run-of-the-mill story by any
standard – highly recommended.
Publishers Weekly starred review.
·
Hardcover: 288 pages
·
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Press; 1st edition (August 21, 2018)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 1464210225
·
ISBN-13: 978-1464210228
Aubrey Hamilton
©2019
Aubrey
Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and
reads mysteries at night.
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