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Bermuda Grass
An Alan Saxon Mystery
Keith Miles
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover)
ISBN: 1-59058-004-4
Publication Date: March, 2002
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from the publisher): Alan Saxon is helping to design a golf course at a new hotel in Bermuda. When his daughter, Lynette, agrees to spend a week on the island with him, he envisages an idyllic holiday. He is soon disillusioned. To begin with, Lynette brings a fellow-student from Oxford with her on the trip and Saxon has grave doubts about Jessica Hadlow. The girl is arrogant, outspoken and brimming with sexuality. Because her father is a wealthy international businessman, her attitude to people and to money makes Saxon gasp.
Once in Bermuda, his troubles really start. The nervous Peter Fullard, the course architect working with Saxon, tells him that someone is trying to sabotage their work. Saxon at first refuses to believe this but, when he discovers a dead body hanging from a cedar in the middle of the new golf course, he has to revise his opinion. His problems multiply. He has confrontations with the police, with his partner, with the hotel management, and with the aggressive girlfriend of the murder victim.
Just when he thinks the worst may be over, Saxon learns that his daughter and her friend have been abducted. He is guilt-striken by the fact that he was in bed with Nancy Wykoff, the leggy Texan with a passion for golf. What kind of father is he?
His ex-wife, Rosemary, is only too pleased to tell him. The crisis situation deepens. Saxon has to calm down his partner, soothe his ex-wife, handle the police, keep Nancy Wycoff at arm's length, take on the egregious Hadlow and deal with the kidnappers. And there is still a brutal murder to be solved.
Saxon begins to wish that he'd never come anywhere near Bermuda ...
Review: Ten years have lapsed between mysteries in this series, and for Bermuda Grass, the fifth Alan Saxon mystery, it was time well spent by the author, Keith Miles.
You don't have to be a golfing aficinado to enjoy this series. Miles may use golfing as a setting (and in this particular book, golfing as a sport is all but absent), however, the mysteries he crafts are interesting in and of themselves. Alan Saxon continues to evolve as a character, and in Bermuda Grass, all his strengths and weaknesses are admirably on display. The island setting adds to the intrigue of the reasonably presented, but nonetheless fairly complex, plot.
Keith Miles writes under two other names, Edward Marston (the Nicholas Bracewell mysteries, the Domesday mystery series, and the Christropher Redmayne series) and Conrad Allen (the George Port Dillman mystery books set on historical ships), but the Alan Saxon mysteries continues to be among his best. Let's hope another ten years doesn't pass before the next one.
Special thanks to Poisoned Pen Press for providing the ARC of Bermuda Grass for this review.
Review Copyright © 2002 Hidden Staircase Mystery Books
Other Alan Saxon mysteries by Keith Miles:
Bullet
Hole
An Alan Saxon Mystery
HarperCollins (1987)
ISBN:
0-06-015764-X
Double
Murder
An Alan Saxon Mystery
HarperCollins
(1988)
ISBN:
0-06-015942-1
Green
Murder
An Alan Saxon Mystery
Little Brown (1990)
ISBN:
0-356-18968-6
Flagstick
An Alan Saxon Mystery
Little Brown (1991)
ISBN:
0-356-19758-1
Honolulu
Play-Off
An Alan Saxon Mystery
Poisoned Pen
Press (2004)
ISBN:
1-59058-071-0
Omnimystery
keywords(s) for Bermuda
Grass ...
Locations referenced: Bermuda, Oxford.
Sports referenced: Golf.
