Black Tide: A Lewis Cole Mystery

DuBois' second Lewis Cole mystery opens with Cole's discovery of a headless, handless corpse in the cold surf off his New Hampshire beach home. Cole, a former Department of Defense spook, pensioned off with his secrets and a generous income funnelled through his job as a magazine columnist, puts the corpse out of his mind, intent on finding the deeply hidden owner of an oil tanker that ruptured, fouling his beloved coast with its cargo.A wizard with a computer and a telephone line, Cole tracks the protected owner but has no way to get at him. Plotting his next step, he's distracted by a friend, Felix, a former Mob affiliate, who wants his help in resolving the fate of some stolen Winslow Homer paintings, long hidden in a dead mobster's safe house.When a powerful thug is brutally murdered in their presence, Cole's friend Felix goes into hiding, and Cole embarks on the dangerous trail of the art thieves, a trek that involves skills Cole had hoped were behind him.With plenty of rugged action and quick spook-type thinking, DuBois has constructed an absorbing tale of greed and utter ruthlessness, occasionally slowed by his hero's tortured, sometimes bitter ruminations over repetitive ground. The New Hampshire and Maine seacoast areas are vividly realized and the tangled plot liines are effectively sorted.

This is a great mystery...even better than his first, Dead Sand...but the plot is just a little far-fetched, and DuBois/Cole are still hung up on SWEAT. Get over it!

Brendan DuBois has obviously learned much from his previous book, Dead Sand. Black Tide picks up a few months after the conclusion of Dead Sand, and pulls the reader almost instantly into the plotline. Unlike its predecessor, Black Tide does not dwell on seacoast details for pages on end. DuBois learns to get past the filler and primarily utilize events and character to fill the page, rather than physical details of the landscape. DuBois' sense of character is refreshing for the mystery novel genre; he has created a both a protagonist and secondary characters that contain just about the right amount of toughness and humanity, but don't cross that borderline into the exaggerated realm of cliche. One sin Dubois did commit in both novels, however, is that of creating a murderer that the reader couldn't care less about. In both cases, a minor character is chosen as the guilty party -- the typical "seems like a nice guy, but I think there's some sinister under the surface" character that the avid mystery reader can pick out after reading just a few pages that involve the character. This is the fly in the soup that exposes what would otherwise be a fairly unpredictable plot. On the other hand, the story is very readable. This holds true in its pace, action, and dialogue. There are some very exciting moments that take place in this seemingly quiet little seaside town, and DuBois kept me hooked through each new development. In the end, what the reader gets is a good commercial mystery novel. I would recommend this novel to a friend, so long as the friend had not read every Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Three Investigators novel ever written. It is a great building block for an author that is fairly new in terms of novels (DuBois has published many short stories), and I look forward to his future development and books. I will be waiting in anticipation of his next Lewis Cole mystery...