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Barrett Raines' life is undergoing some major change, most of it in a negative direction. As the first black detective in the small Deacon Beach, Florida, police department, he attained a measure of respect in spite of the small-mindedness of many of its constituents. When he's offered the opportunity to move to a much bigger department in Tallahassee, he jumps on it. It was a real honor to be selected as an investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. What he doesn't foresee is the impact that the move will have on his family. His wife, Laura Anne, is miserable. She's unable to connect with the people around them. His two sons are subject to violence and intimidation at school, and racism is the common thread. In the interest of the children, Laura Anne packs them up and moves back to Deacon Beach. The separation is hard on Barrett, and he turns to the bottle. He's screwing up badly on the job as a result, to the point where he and his partner, Cricket Bonet, are split up and Raines is placed on desk duty. Barrett and Cricket are given a reprieve when they are assigned to a new case, the gruesome murder of Miles Beynon, a woodsman and hunter, who was also a participant in a drug-related armored-car heist. His partner was a man by the name of Brandon Ogilvie who has disappeared into thin air. Raines follows the leads to a remote bay known as "Dead Man's Bay". It's a small place inhabited by a group of fisherman with a bar run by Esther Buchanan as its community center. Barrett suspects the residents of Dead Man's Bay have information that they are not providing to him and that there may be some kind of smuggling activity going on. Although the inhabitants don't instantly warm up to him (except for one exception, who HEATS up to him), Raines is able to find some trace of Beynon and solve the mystery. The people at this remote outpost have a complicated history, and Barrett is able to untangle most of their threads. The plot moves along nicely with just enough complexity to keep things interesting for the reader. One of the main problems that I had with the book was that I could never accept that Barrett Raines would be the kind of man who would put his career above his family, or that he would turn to drink to solve his problems. He is a strong and proud man, but he generally has his priorities straight. It's obvious that he adores his wife; I just couldn't fathom that the big-time job in Tallahassee was more important to him than his family, especially after the events of the first book in the series, A Rock and a Hard Place. What happens on the island between him and another woman doesn't seem in character, and the ending is a total cop-out, both at Dead Man's Bay and at Deacon Beach. The first book in the series was a hard-hitting and powerful work that focused on the themes of racism and family. I was extremely disappointed to find that Dead Man's Bay didn't measure up to Wimberley's earlier work. He's a talented writer with a knack for characterization and a wonderfully descriptive writing style, but somehow the pieces didn't come together in this book.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, July 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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