Author: Gabby Allan
Genre: Mystery
Trade Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781496731067
Kensington Publishing
256 Pages
$14.49; $9.99 Amazon
July 27, 2021
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After far too many years in the Los Angeles corporate world, Whitney Dagner has come home to Santa Catalina Island off the California coast to help her brother Nick run Nautically Yours, the family tourism business. Between gift shops selling all manner of T-shirts and tchotchkes and keeping her feline Whiskers in fine fettle, she plots the Sea Bounder, a glass bottom boat showing tourists the underwater sights of aquatic plants, marine life -- and a murder victim?
The self-proclaimed "Master of the Island" Jules Tisdale was a wealthy man with business interests throughout Catalina who was about to be honored as Person of the Year before someone strangled him with his own tie and tossed his body into the water. That someone appears to be Nick, who had a raw deal from Jules and no alibi the night of his murder. To clear her brother's name, Whit will have to investigate Jules' shady associates and not exactly grief-stricken family members -- with the unwelcome help of Felix Ramirez, police diver and Whit's ex-boyfriend who's looking to rekindle their relationship...
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Whitney Dagner has returned home from a job she hated to Santa Catalina Island, where she grew up. She's back running her family's tourism business along with her younger brother, Nick. After giving a glass bottom boat tour to a group of people from the Chamber of Commerce, who are giving an award to Jules Tisdale as the Person of the Year, she's glad to have him off her boat. But later that evening he shows up again -- under the boat, quite dead. With Nick the main suspect, Whitney needs to find out who really killed Jules. Unfortunately, with family and friends not fond of the man, it won't be easy, and no one seems to want to help her -- that is, with the exception of her ex-boyfriend Felix, a police diver and a man who wants to rekindle what they started to have before she left...
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. It had an interesting premise -- a protagonist who runs a glass bottom tour boat and has a souvenir shop; not your usual sleuth who's running away from a bad relationship or returning home completely broke. (I have always wondered what they do with their money if they're leaving a 'high-powered job' yet return broke. Are they giving all their possessions away and blowing all their cash? Just sayin'). Anyway, it started out well enough, and I am a big sucker for pets, especially cats, so I was happy to find out that Whiskers is pretty cute throughout the book.
But then Whitney never really looked for any clues. Anything she garnered came from gossip and just fell into her lap. It started to get boring after that. I don't listen to gossip (and it's not always reliable anyway), so I would rather she used her free time to do a little digging for clues.
She just went from place to place and picked up information, and Whiskers didn't play a big part (if it's a Whit and Whiskers, you'd think the cat would be more of the book). Still, this is a first-in-the-series, and I always try to give a new author a pass on the first book, because I realize that the characters and settings probably need a bit of a 'tweaking' before everything falls into place. Saying that, this was a pretty decent start to a new series, and I will definitely pick up the next to see where it is going to go.
More on Gabby Allan's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/gabby-allan/
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