PELICAN BAY - A Maggie Skerritt Mystery is a fast paced,
entertaining, rather light-hearted, murder mystery. Sounds
like an oxymoron -- well you have to read it to understand
the adjectives. Maggie Skerritt is great -- she's a funny,
warm, vulnerable, flawed, and pretty much human police
investigator. Oh and did I tell you -- she's 48 years old and
single by choice. She's just the type of woman you would
want for a good friend and by the end of the book you feel
as if you just made a new one. She's part of a very small,
small-town police squad whose very existence is in question
due to budget concerns. But the immediate concern for Maggie
and her co-investigators are the murders of members of a
help group for overweight people. Someone is out to get the
local "weight conscious" and everyone connected has alibis.
As you meet the players you are quick to judgment as to
their guilt or innocence only to find a new flaw in your
powers of deduction. Bill Malcolm is Maggie's very patient
best friend -- lover -- who has been trying to convince her to
marry him for over 20 years. This little fact gives you
another glimpse into the character of Maggie -- as she
explains over and over how Bill keeps jokingly proposing
several times a year. Only Bill isn't joking. We get to meet
Maggie's family including her very strait laced country club
mother who is hell bent on getting Maggie married and
settled into a more refined life style by setting up blind
dates with guys who turn out to be gay. But you can't help
but like Maggie -- rough language and all. After all how can
you not like a woman who breaks out in hives over the stress
of her job and then proceeds to dinner at the country club
spotted with calamine lotion?
PELICAN BAY is a fast moving, page turner well written by
Charlotte Douglas. Douglas does not waste words -- clues for
the murders are found throughout the book. At any given
point she has everyone looking guilty and then back to
square one once again. Her dialogs are delightful and very
funny. All the characters are multi-dimensional and so very
human. The title suggests that this book is part of a series
and I can't wait to meet up with Maggie once again.
Witty and irreverent homicide detective Maggie Skerritt
liked her quiet, sleepy workdays. Violence in Pelican Bay,
Florida, was rarely an issue, and Maggie certainly wasn't
itching for the tide to change.
Maintaining a professional distance had always been Maggie's
M.O., but the more she learned about the homicide victims,
the less sleep she got. Each woman had started to get her
life back on track — something Maggie had been meaning to do
for years. It was a wake-up call — and Maggie was more
determined, once she solved the case, to reevaluate her own
life. Especially her relationship with a certain former
police detective...
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