First in the Sabrina Salter mystery series, NO VIRGIN ISLAND's inviting cover promises a tropical paradise. However, death stalks a vacationer on the Caribbean island of St John. Sabrina Salter has moved from Boston and Nantucket to one of the three US Virgin Islands, which thrive on hospitality. She finds a dead body in one of the villas she manages, leading her to re-evaluate her choices in NO VIRGIN ISLAND.
Sabrina has a business partner who is conspicuously absent when the body of a man shot dead comes to light. She calls the police first, then Henry. Henry has an alibi, a casual boyfriend. Sabrina has a somewhat distressed background and doesn't need more suspicion and hassle. Her next requirement is her lawyer.
The islands are idyllic to visit but too isolated for many to stay long term. We meet some of the neighbours and learn that conversations near one quiet villa could be heard in others. That's got to be a starting point for an amateur sleuth, and Sabrina needs to clear up the matter and get back in business.
I was surprised by how skillfully author C. Michele Dorsey casts doubt on Sabrina's good name. The reader knows she didn't kill this man but still thinks of her as potentially dodgy. Sabrina tells her background to her lawyer and shows that she has grown in wisdom since leaving her respectable job as a TV weather reporter out of Boston. No wonder finding a dead man stresses her out - and we fully sympathise when the nearest TV station arrives. I thought the reporter was too swift to implicate Sabrina in a litigious country. It wasn't good journalism, but maybe this can happen when someone is a long way from an editor and a studio.
Amid the usual business of house cleaning and villa management, Sabrina and Henry start uncovering unusual factors, and the reader can piece together the complex story which led to the shooting. Is the danger over? That we don't know. The early confusion resolves into increased tension. At the same time, I was amused to find KerryGold butter in the fridge. With lots of great detail about the island life, C. Michele Dorsey has skillfully wound many threads into her mystery NO VIRGIN ISLAND. This is a must for fans of mysteries about ordinary people in exotic locations.
Sabrina Salter traded a high-pressure job as a Boston meteorologist for life as an innkeeper on St. John. But storm clouds roll in when Sabrina finds Carter Johnson, her most attractive guest, tucked up in a hammock way past check- out time… and he’s not just dead to the world, he’s just plain dead, with a bullet hole in his chest. This isn’t the first time Sabrina has seen a dead body, and the island police are well aware of that. Thanks to her checkered history, not to mention the fact that she was the last person who saw Carter alive and far from entirely clothed, she finds herself marked as the prime suspect. The U.S. Virgin Islands may be the sort of place where even defense attorneys wear flip-flops, but the laid-back life is over for Sabrina unless she can clear her name. So, she sets out to solve the crime, only to find herself caught in a tidal wave of adultery, kidnapping, identity fraud and murder in No Virgin Island, C. Michele Dorsey's outstanding mystery debut.
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