Billingsgate Shoal

In 1983 Rick Boyer beat out 800 other writers to win the Edgar (Allan Poe) Award for best Mystery Novel of the year. In BILLINGSGATE SHOAL, Boyer introduced his hero "Doc" Adams, who has so far appeared in eight more installments. Adams is a 50-ish man who is bored with his life. He is a gourmet cook, has studied karate, loves boats and has a good life with wife and two young adult sons. But he has difficulty finding satisfaction in medicine. Doc had taken a good M.D. degree but tossed that career away when his emotions proved not up to his patients occasionally dying. He then took a degree in dentistry, field where patients are unlikely to die. Really boring! So he next combined the two skills and became an oral surgeon. Still boring! But also very profitable and with grateful patients. ***** Early one sleepless morning Doc Adams looks out from his cottage high on a cliff on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He spies a largish boat, perhaps a fishing trawler, stranded at low tide on Billingsgate Shoal, a few miles away across the water. Doc notifies the Coast Guard. But the boat's crew bangs away at an apparent leak in its hull and the trawler (if it is a trawler) floats off with the rising tide and limps into a nearby port for what turn out to be very hasty, superficial repairs. ***** The plot is off and running when Doc Adams suggests to Allan Hart, a young scuba diving friend of his two sons, that he swim out to Billingsgate Shoal and take an underwater look at the trawler. Next day Allan's body is found washed up miles away with a blow to the head. One thing leads to another, clue is piled upon clue and Doc Adams sets out to run down the captain and crew of the trawler to reconstruct Allan Hart's last moments. Doc soon finds himself flailing and fighting for his life among arms smugglers to Ireland and Canada, pirate treasure hunts, faked deaths, assumed identities, offshore bank accounts and general mayhem. Not boring! *****Rick Boyer says that he learned to write mysteries by deliberately imitating the thought processes of Conan Doyle's fictional Sherlock Holmes. BILLINGSGATE SHOAL is roughly one half puzzle to be solved and one half action, violence and perpetual motion. Rick Boyer knows and loves boats and sailing. The novel is set almost entirely in and around Boston and waters off Cape Cod. A map indicating names and places would therefore have been easy to provide and a welcome addition for readers. As I told the author in a meeting earlier this week, truer words were never said than in the first sentence of his prefatory AUTHOR'S NOTE: "The places in this book are real, the people aren't." Doc Adams reminds me of Marquand's MR. MOTOs. Not profound, but moderately challenging as a puzzle to be unraveled. A quick, pleasant read. ***** BILLINGSGATE SHOALS is also available as an acclaimed audio cassette narrated by Christopher Lane. ***** Author Rick Boyer now lives in Western North Carolina and has created a new character, Buck Gentry, a Carolina Mountains game warden. -OOO-