Swept Away: A McLaren Mystery by Jo A. HiestandMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
With all of the cameras and populated areas in today’s world, it doesn’t really seem possible someone could vanish. But it happens, doesn’t it? This time it happened on a beautiful beach on a gorgeous island. And it happened to the wife of one of McLaren’s old friends, one he hadn’t seen for years.
In Swept Away, Jo Hiestand has McLaren traveling to Bow Island. A vacation place, really. The kind that has trips for tourists, biking, sailing, even a pirate museum. Bow Island is a place that Dan and his wife, Ellie, have gone to often, although it is really Ellie who is the pirate enthusiast. Actually, her interests seem to lie more in the businesses that men own. At least it seems to be mostly men that McLaren finds Ellie spent her time with, men other than Dan, that is. So, did she run away, hide so she could be with one of her many “friends”? Did she drown, or was one of them jealous and made sure she got caught in a cave? Was she burgled, maybe pirated away? McLaren feels quite stumped throughout his work on the case. Hiestand makes it just as difficult for us to figure out who, if anyone, did away with Ellie.
There’s plenty of the author’s descriptive writing here, so you picture the pirate caves and enjoy the island. Her ability to help you become friends with her characters winds throughout.
But this mystery is so well-thought-out that you tend to lose the sense that the author thought of it all. It’s as if her character, former police detective Michael McLaren, has laid it out step by step as a good detective would. That mesh of “was it the character or the author” is her innate ability to make you know her characters, let them absorb you into the story. For me, characters are a huge draw to my enjoyment of a book. This one is a winner.
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