Susan Berg works in the detective agency established by her father in Miami. Maybe it's made her too paranoid, she realises as she forcibly tackles an intruder and finds too late that it's her boyfriend. Susan admits the relationship is over and gets back to work. The British High Commission wants to enlist her aid about a vanished girl in Barbados. Most of her clients are looking for runaway partners or swindlers who've sailed off to the Caribbean islands, so the case sounds both respectable and interesting.

In MISSING BARBADOS Susan reluctantly pays bail for a bumbling employee, Dutch, in the Bridgetown, Barbados jail, and starts her search. The missing young woman, Lady Melody, is wandering around the volcanic island incognito with a young man named Reggie, who's eighteen and just out of school. She's beautiful and her father is wealthy, but this doesn't seem to be a kidnap situation. Meanwhile Dutch causes further chaos by breaking into buildings, stealing a bus and driving it into a low bridge, or getting sidetracked by the lure of cash for finding an heirloom sword.

Sugar-white sands, azure sea, island reggae fill this laid- back novel, where drug runners abound and violence is commonplace. Persons carrying handguns are found as often as bartenders wearing dreadlocks. Susan's stoic attitude is balanced by Dutch's improvident one, and the pair get embroiled in several humorous situations as well as dangerous ones.

MISSING BARBADOS by Willem Pain is an unusual crime story which would suit readers of hard-boiled stories rather than cosies.