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THE TREASURE HUNTERS CLUB by Nova Scotian Tom Ryan has something for everyone: Buried pirate treasure! A struggling writer turned intrepid amateur sleuth! A quaint little coastal town, with mayhem around every corner, and a dramatically built mansion overlooking the windswept sea! YA appeal! A bit of a ghost story! Psycho drama, when it's least expected! Of course, there's a tangled web of family secrets – several of them, actually - it seems that almost every family in town has been keeping secrets for so long, that the current generation has lost track of them. Are there red herrings? Maybe. Is there a BIG TWIST at the end? You'd better believe it!
Ryan, who won the Lambda crime fiction award for best LGBTQ mystery in 2021, paints with a vast palette that is both the novel's greatest strength and most bothersome flaw: there's plenty to capture a reader's attention, but the author seems unsure about what sort of reader he's seeking to engage. Maybe that's why there are so many narrators and points of view. The story is fun, but the tone shifts all over the place.
The prologue opens like an atmospheric Hallmark Mystery, with a lively little girl and her beloved grandfather walking along the seashore of the fictional Maple Bay – a quaint village on the coast of Ryan's home province, Nova Scotia - looking for treasures, large and small. Dandy and Grandy, as they call each other, are devoted to the centuries-old local legend of a stolen cache of gems and gold coins that went missing on these shores centuries ago, after the wreck of a pirate ship called the Obelisk. Locals and tourists alike have been searching for the treasure ever since, and the legend has been the basis for a thriving tourist industry, as well as a lot of bitter gossip regarding who may or may not have found the treasure, and then lost it again.
The bitter gossip steers the story into the first shift in tone and time, as Dandy, now a dour, moody teenager, mourns the death of her grandfather, and the loss of his charming seaside home to a greedy relative. She gains the trust of newcomer Peter Bellwood, who has been summoned to Maple Bay by the grandmother he's never met: the wealthy, lonely, imperious Mirabel, owner of the picturesque Bellwoods Mansion (this place has a bell tower, like something out of a Hitchcock novel,) and keeper of many of the aforementioned family secrets.
Peter and Dandy also cross paths with newcomer Cass, the struggling writer who has been rescued from heartbreak and poverty at the last minute by an offer to house-sit in a family friend's home on the shores of Maple Bay. One hopes that Cass is a better writer than she is a house sitter: in town for less than a week, she manages to elicit a threat from a creepy, angry old local ("'I might be a drunk and a shithead, but I'm not stupid,'" he tells her menacingly, as the tone of the novel shifts again – briefly, entertainingly – into hard-boiled territory), almost lose her host/employers' dog, and nearly crash his car into a stranger running alongside the coastal road. The runner is uninjured, however, and kind of cute, so she agrees to meet him for drinks and sailing on the bay, without bothering to learn his last name or confirm his vague origin story.
Peter, Dandy and Cass wind up on the same side of the mystery when a couple of longtime residents are found murdered, and there is reason to believe that their deaths are tied to the missing Obelisk treasure. This is where the story takes a turn toward sort of a hybrid summer rom-com/ Young Adult mystery. As Cass is sailing the bay with the cute stranger, Dandy arranges to meet Peter at the docks by way of a note signed "Dandy Feltzen, Teen Detective," in order to discuss some potential clues. She arrives, clad inexplicably in a black trench coat, black sunglasses, and matching beret, and all three head out in separate, perilous directions to investigate, before unravelling the secrets of the Obelisk treasure, the Bellwood mansion, and a number of current-day and decades-old murders. The plot is all over the place, but it is never dull. Toward the end, in a meta sort of moment, Cass decides to kickstart her career by writing about the experience. In the book she says "I'll have a chart explaining who all the key players are, and maybe a map" of Maple Bay. The TREASURE HUNTERS CLUB includes a map and it's charming, but where's the chart? It would have been helpful, for sure.
§ Mary-Jane Oltarzewski is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Rutgers University Writing Program. In her spare time she enjoys coffee crawls, listening to jazz and show tunes, and spending time in the Catskills with her husband, and a cat who bears a strong resemblance to the Reviewing the Evidence mascot.
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski, October 2024
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