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Overview
From the Edgar-nominated, bestselling series that gets better with each book, and an author who constantly surprises, comes Bermuda Schwartz--a tale of hidden treasure, murder, romance, and rum.A young scuba guide, scouting new dive sites in the shipwreck-laden reefs that rim Bermuda, makes a fatal discovery--a treasure more valuable than gold or jewels. And some people are willing to kill for it.
Enter Zack Chasteen, knockabout palm-tree farmer, and his inscrutable Taino associate, Boggy, who have been dragged to Bermuda by Zack's ladylove, Barbara Pickering. She needs their help throwing a gala 75th birthday party for her wealthy and eccentric Aunt Trula. While there, Zack drops by the bank to visit his money, a couple of million dollars earned in recent exploits that he has stashed away in one of the country's notorious tax-free offshore accounts. Big problem: Zack's money is gone and his bankers can't seem to explain where it is or who might have it.
Zack is grappling with another issue as well: Where is this whole thing going with him and Barbara Pickering? She's not pressing, but it's clear she'd like to tie the knot, maybe start a family. Is Zack really ready to say, "I do?" As he wrestles with the dilemmas of love and money, both of which may wind up lost, Zack falls in with wise and wily Teddy Schwartz, a legendary Bermudan treasure salvager and one of Aunt Trula's longtime paramours. Schwartz is harboring a few secrets of his own, and Zack is soon crossing paths with a secret sect of religious zealots who are hoping to complete a bloody and tumultuous two-thousand-year-old quest.
Suspenseful, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and startlingly original, Bermuda Schwartz is Bob Morris's best book yet, a rollicking island yarn that turns the historical puzzle thriller on its head!
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Wisecracking ex-NFL player Zack Chasteen hunts treasure-and people willing to kill for it-in Morris's offbeat third island-themed adventure (after 2005's Jamaica Me Dead). Zack, who now raises palm trees in Florida, embarks for Bermuda with his British girlfriend, Barbara Pickering, and loyal South American associate, Boggy, to deliver some magnificent Madagascar palms to Barbara's wealthy Aunt Trula. But they get sidetracked from landscaping when they discover a wetsuit-clad corpse-his eyes gouged out-tangled in the rocks offshore. Aunt Trula's good friend, Sir Teddy Schwartz, salvager and diver extraordinaire, becomes their guide and a possible suspect when Zack realizes that the murdered diver was after the legendary true cross, a Christian relic lost in a 15th-century shipwreck that has lured obsessed seekers ever since. Wry humor and engaging Bermuda history help propel the plot. Author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Zack Chasteen, ex-football-playing ex-con, continues his tour of the Caribbean with a Bermuda idyll that mixes three parts rum to one part Da Vinci Code. Trula Ambister wants to celebrate her 70th birthday by planting eight full-grown palm trees at splashy Cutfoot Estate, and what Aunt Trula wants, Aunt Trula gets. So her niece, magazine-publisher Barbara Pickering, gets her sweetie Zack to wrap up some Bismarck palms and accompany them to Bermuda, where the sand is pink, the water is blue and everyone but Zack dresses for dinner. Several piquant surprises await Zack. The first is the corpse he finds floating off Cutfoot Beach clad in full scuba gear but minus its eyes. The second is the news that two bodies with identical wounds were discovered nearby seven years ago. The third is that Trula's old friend Sir Teddy Schwartz is convinced that beneath the friendly waves lies a 500-year-old reliquary containing a sizeable chunk of the True Cross. The fourth is that the $2 million Zack was paid by suave mobster Freddie Arzghanian in Jamaica Me Dead (2005) is gone. One Brewster Trimmingham, who got himself named co-signatory to Zack's offshore account, has filched it, leaving Zack with only a few crumbs. The sunken-relic plot is serviceable, the Trimmingham subplot rather better. Zack himself remains an anti-authoritarian guy with attitude to spare who's just not as funny as he thinks he is.Book Details
Published
February 6, 2007
Publisher
St. Martin's Press
Pages
320
ISBN
9781429916998