Author: Douglas Quinn            
ISBN: 978-1-4001-5088 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4001-5089-0 (ebook)
Publisher: iUniverse

Click Here To Purchase Pelican Point: a Webb Sawyer Mystery

This book is good for a nice summer’s day read at the beach or in one’s favorite hammock.  One warning, though: don’t start Pelican Point: A Webb Sawyer Mystery on an empty stomach.  There are so many references to seafood and some of the wonderful restaurants on the North Carolina coast that one would have to stop reading and go out to find something to eat.

Mr. Quinn has set the book in North Carolina’s beautiful Outer Banks.  It is quickly obvious that he knows and loves that part of the country.  It is also evident that he knows and loves fishing of all sorts—from the descriptions; he’s probably a good cook of the fish he catches.

Although Pelican Point is set in North Carolina, the violent prologue happens in Columbus, Ohio.  The connection is not obvious until the climactic end of the book.

The protagonist of the book is Webb Sawyer, a man who is trying to live a quiet life and suppress the part of his past that caused him to be involuntarily released from the Army—where he’d planned to be a career soldier—after a violent incident in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Sawyer lives in a stilt house on the water and travels to and from the house by a skiff.  His companion in the house is a cat named “Basil” who is a “…gray and black tiger striped cat with emerald green eyes and a perpetual smile.”  Basil is also Webb’s constant companion.

Sawyer’s ex-wife now lives in California and has allowed their son, Preston, to come to North Carolina to attend college at Elizabeth City State University.  The college is close enough for the 19-year old to visit with Webb regularly.

The book’s action begins to heat up when Preston, staying late on campus, discovers that a professor has been murdered.  When he reports the killing to the police, he’s taken into custody and is being interrogated when he calls Sawyer to ask, “Do I need an attorney?”

Webb’s friend, Randy Fearing, is the City/County Prosecutor for Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County and he promptly secures Preston’s release over the objections of the local detectives.

Sawyer has a sometimes-girlfriend named Nan who owns a restaurant. One of her employees, a somewhat ditzy young woman named Nehi, runs afoul of a particularly nasty man, Tico Carijona, who works for a shadowy semi-military organization.  When Webb confronts the man, and nearly breaks his finger, he makes a deadly enemy.

The resolution of Preston’s legal problems; Webb’s hostilities with Carijona, and the mystery posed in the prologue converge finally in a climactic ending—at Pelican Point.