Kathryn R. Wall, Judas Island

Judas Island

Kathryn R. Wall

St. Martin's May 2004, $23.95, 304 pp.

ISBN 03123187X

Bay Tanner enjoys being with her lover in France as he recuperates from an injury he got while helping her on a case. Their idyllic time together ends when Interpol recruits him for another assignment so Bay returns home to South Carolina, unwilling to put up with the fact that he might die on the job like her husband did. At home, Eric informs her that his friend, archeologist Gray Palmer, is working on uninhabited islands off the southeast coast and has found the remains of a dead body.

He wants them to discover who the deceased is. Before they get deep into their investigation, Gray dies, supposedly in a boating accident. His girlfriend insists that Gray was murdered and the same people who killed him are after her. When a bone is Fed-Exed to Eric, they take it to an archeologist who tells them that it belonged to a black man buried for five decades. Gray's father hires them to find out if his son was murdered and then fires them in the same week. Bay and Erik refuse to stop as they are determined to find the island where the bones are burned, risking their life in the process.

A Bay Tanner mystery is always fun to read because it is an exciting action thriller as well as a cerebral mystery. Readers will understand why Bay hides her heartache so no one can pity her. The plot is basically straight line but that doesn't mean the answers to the mystery are easy to solve because there are quite a few people who seek to stop Bay and Erik any way they can in Kathryn R. Wall's exciting amateur sleuth tale.

Harriet Klausner