It is 1982 as The Off-Islander:
An Andy Roark Mystery by Peter Colt begins. Andy Roark came home from
Vietnam with more than a trace of post-traumatic stress disorder and an
inability to easily fit back into the normal chaos of everyday society. He
tried college, the police force, and these days works as a private investigator
in Boston.
His usual cases are insurance fraud and divorce work. Take
a few pictures for a client, write a report, and move on after collecting a modest
fee. His oldest and closest friend dating back to kindergarten is Danny
Sullivan. Instead of Vietnam, Danny went to Harvard Law, and these days makes a
lot of money defending various clients and most of them are a bit shady. He has
a new client and this one does not seem to be shady on the surface of things.
The new client, Deborah Swift, is a bit eccentric and very
wealthy. Her husband is being considered by the power brokers that be for a run
as United States Senator on behalf of California. Image is everything and the fact
that her father came home from Korea, and soon afterwards walked out on the
family and vanished, could be a problem. He could just easily be dead or alive
living a new life doing who knows what.
A nationwide detective agency could not find anything.
They did turn up a little information that a locally based private investigator
might have a better way of running down one way or the other. One of those
leads goes to nearby Nantucket Island. Deborah Swift wants to hire Roark to use
his knowledge of the local area and see if he can quietly and discreetly
determine what happened to her father all these many years later.
Before long, he is working the case
and things are not going well. Leads seem to be next to worthless and Andy
Roark is not getting anywhere fast. It does not help that Danny is expecting
results and pushing hard as he needs this client to be happy. This client and the
money she brings could be Danny’s ticket to the bigtime. At worst, she is a way
for him to ditch his shady clients who pay, but lack respectability. Roark’s
PTSD is not helping things either and memories of Vietnam are never far away in
The Off-Islander: An Andy Roark Mystery by Peter Colt.
Somewhere around a third or a little more of this book is
the memories of war. For one generation, Vietnam was their father’s Korea. That
forgotten war as well as the nightmare of Vietnam and how society treated those
who came home each time is a constant background to the current mystery.
This is the debut novel of a series and as such there is a
lot of character foundation laying in the read. That angle may bore some
readers though I personally was not bothered. The mystery took a bit to get
going which may also turn off some readers who buy into the current notion that
a body must drop in the first three paragraphs. To avoid that, a brief prologue
from an action scene late in the read is inserted at the start to prove to
potential readers that violent things are to come. They are and a lot of them.
I enjoyed The Off-Islander: An Andy Roark Mystery
by Peter Colt. I hope there is a next book in the series.
This book has been a review subject
for two readers very familiar to this blog. Last January, Aubrey Hamilton
reviewed it here.
Before that, Lesa Holstine reviewed it here
on Lesa’s Book Critiques.
My copy came from the Skillman
Southwestern Branch of the Dallas Public Library System and was picked up just
before the pandemic shuttered their doors.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2020
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