I am, as you’ve doubtless noticed, a sucker for mysteries about detectives who live on boats. This is due to a (fruitless) yearning for some second coming of Travis McGee. The Houseboat Detective by Jay Allan Storey was available for free, so I gave it a shot.

It wasn’t bad, but it was (perhaps intentionally) about the polar opposite of a Travis McGee story.

Jake Sommers does not live on a luxurious seagoing barge yacht like McGee, but on a quaint little houseboat, never intended to sail anywhere. And it’s docked more than a nation away from Fort Lauderdale – in Victoria, British Columbia. Jake inherited the boat from his hippie aunt. He ekes out a marginal living playing piano in a bar (he’s a talented musician, but lacks ambition), and he’s working on a serious drinking problem.

One of his neighbors, just to send him a wake-up call, puts up an online ad, advertising Jake’s services as a private investigator. (Jake has a little intelligence training, from the military, but has neither experience nor interest in the work.) But when Evangeline, a beautiful young woman, shows up at his houseboat, offering him money to locate her missing sister, he can’t resist. The woman tells him she never knew she had a sister, and the woman’s profile has now been pulled from the DNA testing site where she found it. Purely by trial and error, Jake begins to turn up leads, though the sister has left suspiciously few traces behind. Meanwhile, the mercurial Evangeline is fascinating him more and more. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that she’s been lying to him from the start.

I get the impression that author Storey is still learning his craft, but he shows some promise. Jake Sommers is an intriguing, wry character (though his bravery when the action starts is a bit surprising to the reader), but he could have been more effective if he’d been written in the first person (there was no plot reason not to). The prose could have used some cutting. It’s not awful, but meanders.

Still, not bad.