3.0 out of 5 stars
"When you mix with the wrong people, you do things you wouldn't usually do", July 23, 2010
This review is from: Pirate Trade (Mass Market Paperback)
Edgar Award winner Rick Boyer's 1995 DOC ADAMS detective thriller PIRATE TRADE is notably convoluted. My guess is that it is a warmup for his 2005 effort in BUCK GENTRY to write "the great American novel."
There are many ways to read PIRATE TRADE: as a didactic treatment of illegal trade in the ivory tusks of elephants, walruses and narwhals; as a crisis in a jealousy-filled marriage; as pretty scenes of Massachusetts and Maine landscapes -- and on and on.
Here is what I suggest that you focus on:
As readers of the series know, DOC ADAMS is a 50-something oral surgeon who lives and practices in historic Concord, Massachusetts. He is easily bored. Doc's sexy wife Mary and he have two grown unmarried sons. Mary's kid brother Joe Brindelli is a state policeman. Doc has two "angels." The good angel is Dr Moe Abramson, psychiatrist. The dark angel is Lithuanian soldier of fortune Laitis Roantis, Doc's martial arts instructor, ex-Foreign Legionnaire and ex-Special Forces operative. All these persons play roles in PIRATE TRADE.
I suggest that you can read this novel as a study in what happens when a good man is led into more temptation than he can handle. That good man is Bill Bedford. Bill and wife Sally had prospered running sports fishing tours off Cape Cod. Came the 1980s economic recession, however, and Bill grew desperate. To avoid selling his big-game fishing boats Bill Bedford, without telling Sally, began smuggling illegal ivory into Massachusetts. For cover he talked unsuspecting Sally into forming CapeWatch, a private group to protect endangered species that used local waters. A year earlier Mary had joined Capewatch, become a passionate environmentalist and also a close friend of Sally.
At story's beginning, Doc has sailed alone to Nantucket and bought as a surprise for wife Mary an expensive purse with a carved ivory oval on its boxlike top cover. Neo-environmentalist Mary had suspected that the ivory was illegal and this was confirmed by a U. S. Fish and Wildlife Officer who then recruited Mary for work using her maiden name Mary Brindelli to visit Cape Cod shops, buy ivory and look for clues to illegal trading.
In a marital spat, Mary walked out on Doc, who was jealous of her non-boring undercover police work and whom she had caught in an apparent love tryst. She contacts neither Doc nor sons as to her whereabouts. Doc then makes a special visit to the town of Hyannis and Bill Bedford's marina and charter service. He had hoped that Mary would have told her friend Sally Bedford where she had fled. No luck. But a careless hint by Doc to 6' 4", 270 pound Bill that Mary may be investigating the ivory trade causes Bill to press Doc with questions. Only days later does this strike Doc as suspicious -- after Mary has briefly reappeared, then disappeared, now feared kidnapped by ivory smugglers. A photograph of a crime scene helps Doc put two and two together: what was Bill's damaged van doing there?
Finally, Doc puts it all together in his imagination. At the same time psychiatrist friend Moe Abramson sends the Dark Angel Laitis Roantis to help Doc find Mary. Taking an increasingly jealous and angry Sally Bedford along with them, they fly north into Maine and stake out a little used cottage of the Bedords. One by one they lure and disarm Mary's captors. These include a young woman who is married man Bill's girlfriend.
At story's end irate wife Sally confronts husband Bill. Earlier the tough Lithuanian soldier of fortune, Laitis Roantis had tried to explain to an unbelieving Sally how circumstances can lead good people like Bill astray:
"Sometimes, Sally, when you mix with the wrong people, you do things you wouldn't usually do" (Ch. 33).
This novel, by the way, is a murder mystery, as well as everything else. One merchant is stabbed to death with an ivory carving of an eskimo in a kayak, hunting walrus with a harpoon. Because, playing undercover investigator himself, he had bought an identical carving the same day, Doc becomes the principal murder suspect. This mystery thriller is so complex and some of its clues so obscurely hidden that it can at times make a reader's mind spin. Let me suggest a second time: Rick Boyer was warming up for even more complexity in his coming BUCK GENTRY. He is packing way more than needed into a thriller. Still, the writing remains high-test and Doc's self-putting-down humor ever lively.
-OOO-
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