The Off-Islander

Boston PI Andy Roark, the hero of Colt’s entertaining debut and series launch, came back from Vietnam with serious PTSD and a simple lesson: you just had to kill the people who were trying to kill you. Decades later, he sits in his office, reading Raymond Chandler and doing routine, minimally interesting investigations. Then his friend Danny Sullivan, a mobbed-up lawyer, puts him on the case of tracking down Charles Hammond, the long-skipped father of a wealthy, scheming beauty, Deborah Swift, who wants to make sure that the missing man had no secrets that would hurt her husband’s accelerating political career. By skill and intuition, Andy follows the trail from Cape Cod to Nantucket, where an apparently guileless and harmless old hippy might be Hammond. Or not. But Andy isn’t the only one looking for Hammond. Like Philip Marlowe—or Robert Parker’s Spenser—Andy has a sharp eye for telling detail and male haberdashery. The resulting tale may not be stunningly original, but those who enjoy newish reworkings of classic PI tropes will be satisfied. Agent: Cynthia Manson, Cynthia Manson Literary. (Oct.)