Tag Archives: Rob Avery

‘Broad Reach,’ by Rob Avery

Overall, however, I concluded that if she were Terrence Well’s trophy wife, he hadn’t won first prize.

I liked the writing and the characters in Rob Avery’s first Sim Greene novel, Close-Hauled, but I didn’t like how it ended. The promise, however, was enough to persuade me to try the second book, Broad Reach. This one was more to my liking, and the author even did a little retcon work to soften the hard landing in the last book.

Sim Greene, former Navy CPO, has left his career in California. He’s steering his sailboat, Figaro, to the British Virgin Islands by way of the Panama Canal. Doing it solo is a challenge, but not an overwhelming one. When he gets to BVI, he plans to use some cash he and his buddy Al acquired in their last adventure, and open a dive shop and salvage business.

But when he arrives, he finds a message from Al. He’s been arrested on suspicion of murder, and is being held without bail. Sim hastens to hire him a lawyer.

Al says he was approached by a beautiful woman, who gave him a plastic bag containing someone’s pocket contents, including a passport, which she found. She asked him to turn it in to the police for her. When he did so, he was arrested for the murder of the passport’s owner. The police seem satisfied they have their man, and are not investigating further. Al has an alibi, but it’s in the form of a woman whom he doesn’t wish to name.

Sim starts asking questions around the islands, discovering that the dead man was involved with drug smugglers, and that the police have been compromised. He also meets a beautiful woman who might just be able to lure him away from life on a boat.

Rob Avery is a good writer, and has done a fine job with characters and plotting here. This is a series I could get to like. I’m waiting for the next book, not yet published.

‘Close-Hauled,’ by Rob Avery

I started thinking about my current situation. No girl to share my time with, no boat to sail on the ocean, a commanding officer wanting to pin my hide to his wall, local cops trying to stick me with a couple murders, and a bunch of bad guys trying to kill me. You could say it was a low point.

I’m a sucker for boat-based mystery series, though I haven’t found many that earned my loyalty for long. Sim Greene is the hero of Rob Avery’s series in that sub-genre. Sim lives on board a small sailboat in Channel Islands Harbor in California. He’s a Navy CPO in his day job, hoping to make it up into NCIS someday. He has a rich, beautiful girlfriend (he’s a little astonished at this turn of events), and loves to surf. He likes his life, and is not looking to change it much. But change is coming to him.

When Sim discovers a dead body while diving, at the beginning of Close-Hauled, his commanding officer calls him in and tells him to investigate the death on his own – reporting only to him. He wants some papers the victim left behind. Sim is excited to take the case on, but soon realizes he’s in over his head. Not only is he forced to operate without official credentials, but more people get killed, and the police have him tagged as the culprit. He’ll have to do some fast thinking – and enlist his best friend, a former SEAL – to figure what really happened and get through it all with his life, let alone his career.

I generally liked Close-Hauled. I thought it well-written and the characters were mostly pretty good (though the hero’s slacker lifestyle annoyed me at times). But I found the downbeat ending deeply unsatisfying. I think I’ll try the second book in the series, but if it ends as unhappily as this one, I won’t go on.