Bob Morris and his series star, Zack Chasteen, are back in their fifth saltwater-flavored mystery, BAJA FLORIDA. While it breaks no new ground for either Morris or his main character, it is surprisingly as engaging and satisfying as anything you are likely to read this year.
Zack, the former NFL player and short-term ex-con, is slowly getting used to fatherhood with his baby daughter on the palm-tree farm he shares with his magazine-publisher wife, Barbara, when he is paid a visit from an old friend, Mickey Ryser. Once a successful, freewheeling businessman, Ryser is now dying of cancer, and wants Zack to do him a huge favor.
He asks Zack to find his estranged daughter, Jen, whom Ryser hasn’t seen in more than 20 years. Ryser plans to live out his few remaining days on an island he’s purchased in the Bahamas, and he wants Jen to spend as much time there with him as possible.
But it’s more complicated than it appears, of course. It seems Jen recently bought a huge sailboat and set off for the Bahamas with some college friends, and then disappeared. Ryser hired a private detective to find her, only to have the detective vanish as well.
Ryser and Zack grew up together; Ryser was literally the big brother Zack never had. But even though he know he owes Ryser big-time, Zack is reluctant to leave his family. Then Barbara gently reminds Zack that even though he is a devoted husband and doting father, domesticity is the kind of shoe that will never fit him. So Zack gathers his long-time ally, Boggy, who claims to be part of a long line of native Taino shamans, and sets off for the Bahaman Islands — or what he and other residents call “Baja Florida.”
The twin spirits of Carl Hiaasen and John D. MacDonald drift through Morris’s novel — as indeed they would through damned-near any Florida-based crime novel. This is evident not only in Zack’s laid-back but resourceful persona, but especially in his first-person narration, where he often observes and bemoans both the unchecked development of his home state and the U.S. homogenization of the world.
Too bad Morris couldn’t come up with a more creative way to break away from Zack’s point-of-view and reveal what is happening to Jen. He resorts instead to the done-to-death technique of alternating chapters in full italics to remind us that we are no longer inside Zack’s mind. Then, too, his plot veers toward flat-out predictability in the last quarter of the story.
But Morris also fills his pages with lots of sun-baked cynicism and humor, high-level action and plenty of Bahamian culture and history. It is these elements — along with our overall affection for Zack, Boggy and the rest of the enlisted crew — that keep us reading.
Morris’ books promise nothing more than to entertain without insulting your intelligence. So if the seasonal blues got you down, pour yourself a generous rum drink, put on some old-school reggae (Toots and The Maytals is perfect, but that Bob Marley CD will do just fine), and put your feet up with BAJA FLORIDA. You’ll be smiling again soon ... even if you skip the rum part. —Alan Cranis
Buy it at Amazon.
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