Rebel Island

Rick Riordan

Language: English

Publisher: Random House, Inc.

Published: Aug 28, 2007

Description:

From Publishers Weekly

At the start of Edgar-winner Riordan's entertaining seventh crime novel to feature San Antonio, Tex., PI Tres Navarre (after 2005's Mission Road), Tres has just retired and married his longtime girlfriend Maia, who's eight-plus–months pregnant. Tres's wheelchair-bound older brother, Garret, has persuaded the couple to honeymoon together with him and other old friends on the Texas Gulf's Rebel Island, where Tres and Garret spent vacations with their dysfunctional parents. When U.S. Marshal Jesse Longoria, a character from earlier books, is killed, Tres gets a chance to work out some unfinished business. As the bodies begin piling up, a lethal hurricane approaches. Fans will enjoy the update on Tres's life as he prowls through secret passageways hunting down the ghostlike killer while the roof of the island's old hotel begins to shred and the seas begin to rise. (_Sept.)_
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From

Fans of the old William Powell–Myrna Loy Thin Man movies will like what Riordan has done with Tres Navarre and his retinue. Garrett, the hand-walking amputee brother, surprises Tres and his eight-and-a-half-month-pregnant bride, Maia, with a honeymoon to a once-luxurious hotel on a subtropical island. The fly in the ointment is the hotel's owner, Garrett's old chum and Tres' nemesis, Alex Huff. Actually, there are two flies in the ointment. The second is a series of mysterious goings-on that Garrett thinks Tres may be able to unravel. They have hardly arrived when a Texas lawman of the take-em-out-to-the-chapparal-and-let-em-try-to-get-away school is murdered, and the desk clerk goes missing. Naturally, a supposedly harmless tropical depression morphs into a Category 4 storm, and the hunt for the murderer is complicated still further. Riordan's strong narrative voice, reminiscent of Randy Wayne White and James Lee Burke, is alive and well in this thriller, as he attempts to enlarge the genre by going back to something the early Dashiell Hammett might have tried. Glassman, Steve