Rich people behaving badly while at their summer houses on Fire Island.  Who ends up dead and how, whose secrets are revealed, and which couples will still be together at the end?

Around 2006, Judy Willman invited her neighbor, author Daniel James Brown, to meet her 92-year-old father.  She’d been reading one of Brown’s books to her father, who wanted to discuss it with the author. 

Willman’s father was Joe Rantz, a member of the 8-oar crew from the University of Washington that rowed for the United States in Berlin, in the 1936 Olympics.

Imagine this.

Your name is Fred. You are 82 years old.  You have outlived all your family, friends and money.  Tonight, you will be homeless.

Walking in the park, you come across your doppelganger. He’s in a wheelchair, and he seems to be dead. 

Picture driving across country, hauling a rig bearing two young giraffes.  You need 12 feet and 8 inches of clearance to avoid bonking their heads (which would be much messier than crunching the top of a box trailer or shipping container).  You’ve scoped the route in advance, but encounter detours that lead to overpasses or tunnels with insufficient clearance.  What do you do?

This is the first book I’ve read by David Baldacci.  It’s not light-hearted, but it is a page-turner. I look forward to reading more.

I finished this book a few months ago. I won’t soon forget Ignatius and his mother!

One consequence of spending more time on my writing this year is that I’ve read fewer books than usual for me.  Now that Retire to An Island, They Said (Lighthouse Island Book 1) is in editing, and I’ve typed “The End” on the first draft of Salty Pause (Lighthouse Island Book 2), I should have some time to catch up.  I started today, by reading a whole 295-page book in four hours!

In February 1917, 14-year-old Katherine Schaub began work as a painter in a watch factory owned by the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey. She joined dozens of other young women whose job was to make the tiny numbers on watch dials glow in the dark by applying radium paint.

Five and a half years later in Ottawa, Illinois, 19-year-old Catherine Wolfe was one of another group of young women who began similar work for the Radium Dial Company. In both locations, the girls were taught to sharpen the points on their paint brushes by rolling them between their lips – after they had been dipped in the radioactive paint.

Dempsey, the protagonist, works as a lobbyist in D.C. until her crooked boss sets her up to take the fall when he gets busted for bribery. Framed and fired, her father offers her a “get-out-of-D.C.” card in the form of a dilapidated family house in Guthrie, Georgia, a small town north of Macon and southeast of Atlanta. In exchange for a place to live, dear old Dad gives her an inadequate budget to prepare the house for sale. Dempsey quickly meets a cranky old cousin and her terrier, along with the town’s horndog, its Mr. Nice-Guy, its Matlock and a wise old handyman.

The plot not only asks “Who Done It?” but also raises the question of whether the body at the bottom of the cliff in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, was even a murder victim.  Was it a suicide?  Or an accident?  Much like a video game I used to play on my tablet called “Criminal Case,” the police find bits and pieces of evidence and encounter a plethora of suspects – all of whom seem to drive red sports cars. 

This whodunit finds Hannah, 10 years after the murder of her college roommate and best friend, facing her lingering doubts whether the right person – convicted largely on the circumstantial evidence she provided – went to jail.