Review: The Off-Islander: An Andy Roark Mystery by Peter Colt

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