Troubled Paradise - Hardcover

Royce, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1884953115 ISBN 13: 9781884953118

Publisher: Eaton Street Press, 1998

Key West thinks of itself as paradise. Fortune teller Carmen Alverez tells Key West family man, Middleton, his life line is very short. Jose and her detective husband and her daughter are vacationing there and they find it a 'troubled paradise'. Rupert Middleton is murdered atop a Ferris Wheel. Josie and her husband resist getting involved in solving the murder but the piling up of sinister events prompts Josie to help the police chief.

Women and men find Philip Marlow handsome; it's made him egotistical. But he is well liked because of his humour, his charm and his good manners. Phil's full name prompts him to identify with novelist Chandler's detective, Philip Marlow. In a bookstore, Phil charms widow Maude Middleton. She reads all of Chandler's novels.

On the Dry Tortugas a male friend of Carmen Alverez is murdered and shortly thereafter Josie's daughter, Yoriko, falls down steep stairs. After lunch at Little Palm Island, Carmen and her friends are surprised to see Maude Middleton and Phil Marlow arguing angrily.

At lunch in a small open-air cafe, Carmen and Josie, see Phil killed by a hit-and-run driver. A child, an idio-savant in the cafe, remembers the license number of the car. On Grassy Key clues as to who rented the car provides disclosure of who the killers are.

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About the Author:

Jack Royce has written eight mystery novels. It is a pen name for an author who has had published twenty non-fiction books about the theatre arts. He has translated from the French, Russian and Italian classics. He has lived in Key West, Florida for the last fifteen yers after traveling around the world five times.

Review:

"A warm and charming protagonist guides Jack Royce's readers through riotous mayhem and grisly murder." -- Perry Allen, Metropolitan News

"Key West quivers when local lust and greed spawn murder. Jack Royce has done it again, but on US soil." -- Cameran Ainsley, Lancaster Arts Review

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.