As the first installment in a series of mysteries starring Miami police detective Remy Ferguson, Mystery of L’inconnu introduces us to the detective and his team. For this reader, it wasn’t a very impressive debut.

“L’inconnu” (French for Unknown) is a very large, state of the art luxury yacht owned by a yacht manufacturing company. As a sales inducement, the company periodically offers free cruises to small groups of the super-rich, so they can enjoy the service, food, and amenities. But this voyage goes very, very bad.

The first part of the book concentrates on the story of the voyage, in which we gradually learn that one of the crew has made a deal with smugglers to take drugs on board at sea, to be delivered in Miami. Then the deal goes very, very wrong, and soon there are cartel gunmen rampaging through the vessel while the crew and passengers try to devise ways to either hide or defend themselves. They do surprisingly well, and the reader is rooting for them.

(Spoiler coming up.)

Then we switch to the investigation, led by our hero, Detective Remy Ferguson. And we are abruptly informed that pretty much all these people we’d been rooting for are dead. Remy’s investigation is subjected to pressure by his superiors, who are being pestered by the (very influential) yacht company to wrap the case up.

Then we get a final section, where we are presented with a Big Plot Twist (admittedly not a bad one), and a perilous situation from which our hero escapes only through a deus ex machina.

In my opinion, this is a very poor way to tell a story.

On top of that, the prose was weak. The author often misuses words, confusing “Cavalry” with “Calvary,” “flare gun” with “flair gun,” and other such errors. He appeared (I wasn’t quite sure because the prose was confusing) to confuse a rifle with a shotgun. He thinks Multiple Personality Disorder is the same as schizophrenia. And he delivers clumsy lines like, “’Whatever works,’ Brewer mumbled his simplistic estimation.”

Mystery of L’inconnu was a disappointing novel. I did finish it, though, so I suppose it wasn’t a total narrative failure.