{"id":14049,"date":"2020-08-10T18:08:56","date_gmt":"2020-08-10T22:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=14049"},"modified":"2020-08-10T18:08:56","modified_gmt":"2020-08-10T22:08:56","slug":"close-hauled-by-rob-avery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=14049","title":{"rendered":"‘Close-Hauled,’ by Rob Avery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a sucker for boat-based mystery series,<\/strong> though I haven\u2019t found many that earned my loyalty for long. Sim Greene is the hero of Rob Avery\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Sim discovers a dead body while diving, at the beginning of Close-Hauled<\/a><\/em>, his commanding officer calls him in and tells him to investigate the death on his own \u2013 reporting only to him. He wants some papers the victim left behind. Sim is excited to take the case on, but soon realizes he\u2019s 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\u2019ll have to do some fast thinking \u2013 and enlist his best friend, a former SEAL \u2013 to figure what really happened and get through it all with his life, let alone his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I generally liked Close-Hauled<\/em>. I thought it well-written and the characters were mostly pretty good (though the hero\u2019s slacker lifestyle annoyed me at times). But I found the downbeat ending deeply unsatisfying. I think I\u2019ll try the second book in the series, but if it ends as unhappily as this one, I won\u2019t go on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading ‘Close-Hauled,’ by Rob Avery<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[532,2386,2586],"class_list":["post-14049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-close-hauled","tag-rob-avery","tag-sim-greene"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}