The St. Lucia Island Club

The St. Lucia Island Club by Brent Monahan   306 pages

Since 2000, author Brent Monahan has been penning the John Le Brun detective series. The St. Lucia Island Club is the fifth novel, and the latest, novel in the series. If I had realized that when I agreed to review, I’m not sure I would have.  However, Monahan does an excellent job in not having to have read the four previous investigations to enjoy this effort.  He did make several references to the first book, which were really unnecessary.

In this episode the “retired Southern sheriff-turned-New York City detective John Le Brun and his wife, Lordis, set sail in 1910 for a long-awaited honeymoon on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, they expect to find relaxation in paradise.” They are traveling with another couple, but I don’t think that was their intention. The two couples seem to annoy each other.

Once there, they discover that they have been recruited to take the island’s perks back to their friends in Manhattan as a place they should vacation. The book, set in 1910, regales the reader with the lush descriptions of the island’s beauty, decades before it became an international commercial paradise that boasts more than 50 resorts. I loved this aspect of the story, and set against the racial, economic and social tensions of the island, it made for a wonderful dichotomy that many books today don’t have. The writing also has that slow, old-fashioned feel to it. It’s not a page-turner, but a book to be savored, even when the topic is murder.

Soon after their arrival, Le Brun is invited to join the wealthy planter’s at the Club (not sure why Monahan is fixated on men’s clubs). Then a planter’s family is horribly murdered, in what the guilty parties hope to appear as an accident. It’s a clever murder method that I rarely see used.

It’s not hard to figure out who-done-it.  And, for what I could gather, this is the first time that our hero allows his wife to help him as much as a female on that island can.

I enjoyed The St. Lucia Island Club and give it 4 out of 5 stars.