Nasty Breaks

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Golf pro Lee Ofsted takes a whack at teaching golf and another whack at solving a murder in her third outing, which follows 1995's Rotten Lies. The fledgling pro's friend, Peg Fiske, wangles her an invitation to assist teaching pro and TV pitchman Jackie Piper at a lovely resort on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. She'll be teaching golf to employees of Sea Recovery Systems, a marine salvage company, who will taking a working vacation at the resort. The job is a plum: the pay is good, the timing coincides with Lee's boyfriend's being out of the country, and Peg, a management consultant, will be there too, working with the same group from SRS. But the perfect working vacation falls apart quickly as the SRS people assemble at the resort. First, Lee interrupts an attempted kidnapping of the wife of SRS's owner, Stuart Chappell. Then Chappell is murdered in a way that suggests revenge. The tangled personal and professional relationships of everyoneSRS employees, the innkeeper, even the local golf proprovide plenty of knots for Lee and Peg to unravel as they probe a murder with ancient and watery roots. Duffers will recognize themselves or someone they know among the amusing approaches the "students" take to hitting a ball as the Elkinses break par with their latest collaboration.

Kirkus Reviews

Twenty-five years ago, salvage divers Stuart Chappell and Benny Trotter, desperate to escape the stormy seas off Block Island, abandoned their partner Andy Gottlieb as he searched for the treasures aboard the long-sunken Good Hope. Now, even though Stuart has long purchased Benny's partnership for a pittance and made a fortune for himself, the two of them are back together at the island's Mooncussers Inn, where Benny's hosting the annual executive-planning-and-golf-retreat for Stuart's Sea Recovery Systems (SRS). The teaching pro will be motormouth telemarketer Jackie Piper, but what golf package would be complete without struggling LPGA pro Lee Ofsted (Rotten Lies, 1995, etc.) to give chipping and putting tips, chat up the competitors for the executive vice-presidency of SRS, and run into her usual quotient of felonies? The headliners this time are the attempted snatch of Stuart's imperious wife Darlene ("the Grand Czarina") by kidnappers seeking a ransom of exactly $650,993, and the murder of Stuart, who's stabbed in the neck with an iron spike from—that's right, the Good Hope itself. Is the motive simple avarice? Jealousy among the SRA also-rans? Or revenge on the part of one of the divers' distant relatives (more numerous here than at a family reunion)? More to the point: Will Lee ever get any closer to a round of golf than the loss of her graphite-shafted Cobra lob wedge?

Dependable light entertainment. Add two strokes to your score, though, if you can't spot the murderer before the ninth green.