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.

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

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.

Lesa's Book Critiques: The Off-Islander by Peter Colt

Lesa's Book Critiques: The Off-Islander by Peter Colt