|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
After leaving her French lover when he refuses to resign his job with Interpol, Bay Tanner returns home to South Carolina to her fledging investigative firm. A certified public accountant by training, Bay has recently started a business with two partners, one is an Internet wizard and the other is her father, a former judge with many friends and contacts, who is now confined to a wheelchair. Right away, her Internet partner tells her they have a client. Gray Palmer, a former drinking pal of his from collage, has found a human bone buried in a deserted location. While Bay wonders why they are involved and the police not called, Grey is discovered dead, drowned near his boat. First asked by Grey's beautiful roommate, and then by his rich father to help find what happened to Grey, Bay's firm becomes even more involved when the human bone turns up in her mail. It had been Fedex-ed to them before Grey died. Meanwhile Bay is asked to do what she does best, check the books of a popular restaurant, which even though it is doing booming business, looks to be failing. Just as Bay finishes advising the owners on what to do about their cheating bookkeeper, she gets another client - her father's housekeeper. It seems that Bay's father has been giving money to an elderly floozy - and the question is why? In between long segments of remembering what happened to her in the previous books in this series, Bay mopes about her life as she goes about solving these mysteries. Kathryn Wall's JUDAS ISLAND is the fourth in the Bay Tanner series. More involved with Bay's own take on Southern culture, remembering passages of previous books, and the woes of her personal life, JUDAS ISLAND has little going for it as a mystery. The main character isn't trained as a PI, has no license, and on top of that isn't much of a natural sleuth. By the end of the book, each and every mystery is solved with little help from Bay. In fact, all of the mysteries are concluded by the simplest means; people confess and simply tell Bay the answers. I found myself wondering why the characters in the book don't just hand the problems to the police - Bay wonders the same thing but doesn't answer the question, she just goes about blundering until the interested parties simply unfold their tales for the readers. Many times I felt let down by the lack of real action in the story. When racial slurs are painted on her home, Bay dismisses it as a mistake. The readers get to ride along with Bay, as she meticulously details for us which block and street she passes as she tails the elderly woman who is getting money from her father. Why? Nothing happens, and as usual, at the end of most of the chapters, Bay goes to have a meal. There's no payoff and no excitement through much of this book. Worst of all, Bay holds no attraction for the readers; she has no sense of humor and doesn't seem to have a caring thought for anyone else in her world. She simply isn't likeable or interesting. JUDAS ISLAND is smoothly written and Kathryn Wall's dialogue flows well. She can also describe location nicely, but she needs more work in forming a mystery and working out a plan to make it important for her characters to be involved in the story. By the end of the novel it's painfully apparent that Bay should go back to being a CPA, only concerning herself with working on numbers. A sleuth she's not.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, June 2004
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
