Valley Gay Press Book Reviewer: Liz Bradbury
I really wanted to like this book. It had potential - lesbian mystery, warm sandy beaches, romance, intrigue... But it didn't pay off. While the descriptions of the landscape in Belize were fairly lush, the character development and action seemed stunted and flat.
There's really no mystery for the reader to figure out, no clues, just the solution revealed at the end. When main character of the series Lynn Evans meets the sultry Ivette, there's little tension and their ultimate affair is so abbreviated it seems as though a prudish editor cut it out and substituted the words "They made love." In fact the whole book seems cut down, maybe it was, at only 188 pages.
At least the characters don't suffer from low self-esteem and internalized homophobia, like many characters in other lesbian mystery stories of the last ten years. So good for Claudia McKay on that point.
McKay has written other novels more recently, (she wrote this in one 1997). I'd bet she could pull off a better effort if she had better editorial help and less restrictions (and if someone would let her use contractions in her dialog, after all, that's the way people talk!). Here's hoping.
