Not much detective work, but plenty of amiable hokum about Phil Nevitt, a young New Englander working for a rum company after Prohibition who is sent to a Caribbean island to investigate a rival outfit. Annunziata may be small but it has everything -- sun, sand, a mountainous interior, a Creole aristocracy, cheerful negroes who chatter away in broken English, and a club for the dissolute whites who run the place, including the US Administrator, Randal Trantor. Trantor is a rich drunk: his Creole offsider Bareda manages his many commercial enterprises, including the distillery.
On a ride to the interior Phil runs into a pig-sticking expedition led by seventeen-year-old hellcat Eve Brinsley. She is whipping a Negro retainer for disobedience when they meet, and raises the whip to Phil before he takes it off her; after this kinky beginning they naturally fall for each other. But Eve is engaged to marry Trantor, with her mother's approval, and her father is a drunk who is helpless to stop the marriage.
On hearing this news Phil gets drunk himself -- what can you expect on an island whose main product is rum? -- and gets in a fight with John D'Acosta, a Creole who is also interested in Eve. Ordered to leave the island, he stays long enough to foil D'Acosta's attempt to abduct the bride. The wedding takes place, but at the reception Trantor dies from poisoned whisky, and the hunt for the killer is on. Was it Phil, D'Acosta, Eve, her father, or someone else altogether?
There is the obligatory scene in a voodoo hut of an old woman with Strange Powers -- but her powers aren't enough to stop her from getting murdered too. Nevitt's detection consists mainly of following people around and waiting until all the other suspects are dead or otherwise accounted for, so the least-likely-suspect outcome will surprise nobody. The hero is a sanctimonious thug , half the male characters are steeped in alcohol, and the racial attitudes in the book are definitely old-fashioned; but there's enough local colour to make the story entertaining.
Jon.
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