The gray sky, which often broke up or dissolved by midmorning, remained as solid as fresh paint.

I had read and reviewed a previous novel in Scott William Carter’s Garrison Gage mystery series, and decided not to read any more. I don’t clearly recall why; it likely had something to do with the main character’s open (though not obnoxious) atheism. But Bury the Dead in Driftwood sounded intriguing, and I bought it. I have to admit, it was pretty good.

Garrison Gage is a small-time private eye who relocated to Barnacle Bluffs, a town on the Oregon coast, to get away from his past. He walks with a limp (often with a cane), due to an old knee injury. A widower, he has adopted a daughter, who is now away in college. He finds, to his amusement, that he’s become a local character, “the detective.”

He didn’t know Harriet Abel, the high school teacher whose body was found under a pile of driftwood on the beach. But she had his name on a piece of paper in her possession, and apparently wanted to hire him. Gage is curious what she wanted from him, and impressed with the universal respect she seemed to command. So he decides to investigate, even without a client.

Property and development money will appear as motives, but things aren’t as simple as they appear. Amusingly, Gage finds beautiful women – including the police chief’s daughter – throwing themselves at him in an almost embarrassing way. A mysterious professional killer appears to make chilling threats. And the one woman Gage cares about more than life itself – his adopted daughter – refuses to keep a safe distance.

I enjoyed Bury the Dead in Driftwood far more than I expected. The one scene involving religion – in a syncretistic Universalist church – took no skin off my nose. The multiple women with Gage in their sights worked up to a very funny scene of embarrassment. And at the end, Gage was able to deliver a fairly non-PC defense of a man’s sense of obligation to protect women.

Mark Twain said of Huckleberry Finn that he had attempted to do a book without weather. Bury the Dead in Driftwood is nothing like that. The weather and geography of coastal Oregon are active characters in this book, beautifully described. Readers will feel as if they’ve been there.

Cautions for the usual, including one “sex” scene that actually involves no sex at all. Pretty good.