Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: The Banker: An Andy Roark Mystery by Peter Colt

 

The sixth appearance of Boston private investigator Andy Roark finds him out of his depth in an embezzlement case. He’s never investigated financial fraud before but he needs the money and the case doesn’t sound that hard. Harry Brock, president of Merrimack Community Bank in Amesbury, on the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border, retains him to watch the three employees who have the access to remove $2 million from the bank’s accounts. Brock says he doesn’t see how the money was taken and he wants Roark to find the one who is spending more money than he or she should be.

After two weeks of following three apparently blameless people leading quite ordinary lives, Roark resigns out of sheer boredom. Brock urges him to stay on the job, offers him more money but Roark is convinced he isn’t the right person to learn where the money is and who took it. About a month later Roark learns that Merrimack Community Bank was robbed the day before and one of the employees he followed for two weeks was killed. While there was no obvious connection between the embezzlement and the robbery, Roark was still uneasy about what seemed to be a coincidence. He had just completed three cases and he had the leisure to look around again in Amesbury so he returned to the small town where he discovered enough to become convinced something odd was going on in the bank.

I reviewed the first title in the series five years ago and I noted then it would be interesting to see how Colt dealt with the enormous technology revolution that was soon to occur. Colt seems to want to keep Roark firmly in the 1980s. This book is set in 1986 and there are mentions of computer printouts on green and white striped paper but pay phones were still commonplace and the internet was not yet available to the public. References to Vietnam and Roark’s tour of duty, to the pop songs playing on the car radio, and to the various Boston sports teams are the only obvious ways to establish the timeframe, although readers more familiar with Boston can likely tell from mentions of construction projects and restaurants.

Colt has got the whole PI trope down pat. The story shifts gears seamlessly from a dull stakeout assignment to something much more sinister. The shootout at the end is slickly choreographed and executed, and the resolution is satisfying. This series is reminiscent of Spenser, and readers who miss him and John Francis Cuddy, or just private eyes in general, should look into these books.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Severn House; Main edition (March 4, 2025)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Hardcover: ‎240 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1448310717

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1448310715

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link:  https://amzn.to/3X7QgXS

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Off-Islander by Peter Colt

The Off-Islander by Peter Colt (Kensington, 2019) is the first in a projected series of private investigator mysteries with Andy Roark, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Set in Boston in 1986, 10 years after the fall of Hanoi, Andy is still having trouble assimilating into the civilian world. He tried college, he tried the police force, and he’s fallen into collecting evidence for divorce filings and following up on personal injury cases. Nothing challenging but it’s a paycheck. His high school friend, now lawyer, Danny Sullivan throws work his way occasionally and brings him in to find Charles Hammond, who walked away from his family some 30 years ago. The client, Hammond’s daughter, is not interested in re-uniting with Hammond but she is worried about potential fallout that could affect her husband’s political career. She wants to know what he’s been up to so she can nip whatever trouble there might be in the bud.

The major clue is the list of addresses to which the Veterans Administration has mailed his pension checks for years. The West Coast locations were investigated without success so Roark decides to look into the only East Coast address. This involves lots of driving back and forth between Hyannis and Boston in heavy traffic, offering plenty of opportunity for commentary on the region. The Hyannis place turns out to be the site of a former commune run by an artist who paints in the style of Georgia O’Keefe. She doesn’t remember Hammond among the dozens of people who came and went during the 70s. Still, when the house and outbuildings are burned to the ground a week or so later, along with the artist, Roark knows he’s hit a nerve.

The ending is surprising enough to be satisfying. Colt has a gift for descriptive detail, which he uses as much for wartime flashbacks as he does for the investigation underway. As much as half of the book is devoted to Roark’s memories of Vietnam, which I certainly hope will decrease in future titles. I am more than a little tired of veterans with PTSD as protagonists.

It will be interesting to watch how well Colt manages the technology changes that are about to turn the world on its ear, with the internet becoming public in 1991, a short five years after the timing of this debut novel. The first cell phones became widely available to the public in the mid-1980s, about the time of this story. Personal computers were already in use, if not especially common.

If Colt can develop more substantial plots and reduce the wartime ruminations, this series will be one to watch.

·         Hardcover: 240 pages

·         Publisher: Kensington (September 24, 2019)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1496723414

·         ISBN-13: 978-1496723413

·         Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/41nJH67 

Aubrey Hamilton ©2020

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.