Crime of the week – Mysterious double murder on a SegelbootIn “Sun Detective – shadows over Florida” by William Wells a sarcastic retired Cop investigating a spectacular murder case.Hanspeter Eggenberger0 KommentareDas sailing ship in this mystery the crime scene, the coast of Florida around makes for a pretty Drum.Photo: The first set of
caused The sudden slump in the Pine Island Sound, that the sailing boat – a twelve-metre-long Catalina sloop named “Joie de Vivre”, which was sailed to port is inclined to the wind there was gradually slow down, finally straightened up, and only in the water engine.
The book
Jack Starkey was a successful Homicide detective with the Chicago police. Now he is retired and enjoys life in Fort Myers Beach, a small town on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. He lives on a house boat, runs a Bar and is in a relationship with a real estate agent of Cuban origin. Everything is beautiful. Only that he had “felt since the day I gave back in Chicago, my brand, always half-naked”. Because he wants to feel “useful again”, he immediately, as his buddy Cubby Cullen, the local police chief, to him for his expert help in a spectacular murder case, asks.
For a symbolic annual salary of one Dollar Starkey is back in business, and a police gets brand. “The Dollar-a-Year Detective” is because of the second Starkey novel in the Original, which is now published as “Sun Detective – shadows over Florida” in German. As his Hero the author William Wells enjoys his Pension in Florida. The 74-year-old former Journalist and marketing man has only begun in the last years, to write novels. They might be a little old-fashioned – is also the Protagonist says, by the way: “If I am nothing else, old-fashioned, I am”, but they are also pretty funny.
the head of the local Bank and his wife were Murdered. They were shot on their sailing boat, the killer has left no traces. Starkey poking a little bit everywhere and waiting for something to happen. And soon there is another corpse. The tracks indicate a large matter, with implications in the policy of Florida, in the Offshore Ölbohrbusiness and a Russian oligarch.
With a series of sarcastic comments Starkey is limping through the fall. “My motive is and has always been, to catch the killer. On the other hand, I’ve been living for four years in the Gulf and would only see hate that Oil, dead fish and ölverschmierte seabirds are washed up on the beaches.”
A special attraction is the double-game with the fiction, which operates Wells. Jack Starkey is the model for Jack Stoney, the protagonists of a crime novel set in a Chicago journalist. So passages from the new Stoney’s novel, the Starkey to control reads a flow again and again, in the story. The fictional world is preferable to the real often, he finds. That people would notice that he is behind the novel’s hero, is Starkey’t matter, “even if I’ve had to put any amount of teasing from friends about his higher hit-rate once – and not just cases, but also in the case of women”.
The rating originality: ★★★☆☆voltage: ★★★☆☆realism: ★★★☆☆Humor: ★★★★☆overall impression: ★★★☆☆The photo of the Author: PD
William Wells, born in 1946 in Detroit, studied English literature at Hamilton College. He served aboard a destroyer in the U.S. Navy and worked for the Navy as a Journalist. In civilian life he was a Radio and the press worked as a speechwriter for the Governor of Michigan, Manager in a marketing Agency, and finally as the owner of a Corporate Publishing company. In retirement he began to write novels.
2014 appeared “Ride Away Home”, and in 2016, he launched the series to the Ex-Cop Jack Starkey in Florida with “Detective Fiction” (English: “Sun Detective”, 2019), and two years later followed by “The Dollar-a-Year Detective” (“Sun Detective – shadows over Florida”). In the United States, the third volume, “The Now-and-then to Detective in March of this year,” appeared. William Wells lives on the southwest coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico.
Cover: PD
William Wells: “Sun Detective – shadows over Florida” (Original: “The Dollar-a-Year Detective”, The Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, 2018). Translated from English by Wolfgang Müller. Wilhelm-Heyne-Verlag, Munich 2020. 298 p., about 15 Fr.
comments please Log in to comment
