Kate Myers (Excavations) brings her signature wit and wild rumpus of characters to Salty, her sophomore novel featuring estranged sisters who love each other dearly, and luxury yacht owners who will go to absurd lengths to remain luxury yacht owners.
Captain Denise has spent 20 years working her way up through the ranks of Ahoy, a yacht management company catering to the "low end of the very rich." Unfortunately, her work dictates that she never question the owners--even when the owners are the loathsome Falcon family, the wealthy and unfeeling jerks who tore down her childhood home to build a new condo. This would have been bad unto itself, as it required extensive and suspicious zoning changes on the small peninsula property, even without the man-made lagoon dug into the small spit of land to somehow improve the view. "Pools were too small, too denatured; lagoons were apparently part of a new, loathsome trend to pave paradise and dig a bigger, plastic paradise with an in-ground liner that lasted twenty-five to thirty years." Things only get worse for Denise when her world-traveling younger sister comes home looking for work, the condo building collapses, and an elderly neighbor turns up dead--and that's all before the Falcons' ridiculous yacht sinks under suspicious circumstances.
Myers has a way of building multi-layered and nuanced drama that could rival the best (and worst) of Bravo's Housewives. Salty is filled with family dysfunction, illicit affairs, shady business dealings, upstairs-downstairs clashes, star-crossed lovers, extravagant meals, and truly over-the-top décor choices. (The Falcons' yacht, renamed the Lagoonatic by the younger and dafter Falcon son, is "seventy feet long, three stories high... redesigned to look like an embalmed aquarium: eel railings, conch shell doorknobs, squid chandeliers").
The what-exactly-happened/whodunit tension keeps the plot ticking along, but that's not to suggest that Salty is a thriller; it's more a perfectly plotted and well-paced beach read, as the sisters reluctantly put aside their differences to take on the Falcon family. It's the very definition of fun, packed with quirky humor, well-placed puns (a CPA's yacht named Tax Seavasion), and quippy character descriptions that are as amusing as they are illustrative ("He looked like the Monopoly Man had been spit out the other side of a Buffett concert"). Readers will laugh, root for the most unexpected group of underdog sleuths, and raise a glass to the overdue demise of the filthy rich as Salty anchors itself amid the best of vacation reading. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Estranged sisters reunite to take down a family of shady real estate developers in this upstairs-downstairs mystery rife with million-dollar yachts and sharp humor.