Sun, Sand, Murder
A Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Written with a wry, witty narrative voice and a plot full of twists and turns, John Keyse-Walker’s Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award-winning debut is a pure delight.
As a Special Constable, Teddy Creque is the only police presence on the remote, sun-drenched island of Anegada, nestled in the heart of the British Virgin Islands. In all his years on the job, Teddy has never considered the possibility that he might have to address an actual crime on his peaceful island. That is, until he receives a hysterical call about a dead man on the beach.
Indeed, Teddy is shocked to discover Paul Kelliher, a biologist who traveled to the island every winter for research, lying dead on the sands of the island’s most remote beach, killed by a single shot to the head. And when the BVI’s “real police” task Teddy with informing Kelliher’s nearest kin of his death, Teddy makes an even more surprising discovery: there’s no record that Paul Kelliher ever existed.
Suddenly Teddy’s routine life is thrown into tumult as he tries to track a killer—against his boss’s wishes—while balancing his complicated family life, three other jobs, and the colorful characters populating the island around him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keyse-Walker's appealing debut, set in Anegada, the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands, won the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award in 2015. Since the island has not had a murder since 1681, Teddy Creque, a special constable in the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force, has no experience to draw on when Paul Kelliher, an American professor studying the local iguanas, is shot to death on a quiet beach. Creque's rigid superior, Deputy Commissioner Howard Lane, reprimands Creque, who moved the body to a tent to protect it from the voracious crabs and gulls, for altering the crime scene. Creque, who gets nowhere when he tries to notify the victim's next of kin, believes that Kelliher was involved in treasure hunting, but Lane is convinced drug traffic is more likely and calls in the Drug Enforcement Agency from the U.S. Creque, with his honor and job at stake, rises to the challenge of catching a killer, but he succeeds only at great personal cost in the surprise ending.