‘Trouble Island’ by Sharon Short. Minotaur, 336 pages, $29
The aptly named Trouble Island is a dark, foreboding place, located in Lake Erie and containing a large, gothic-like mansion with a few outlying buildings. The island is a midway point for criminals moving between Canada and the United States in 1931.
It’s also a refuge — admittedly an uncomfortable one — for two women with different reasons to hide from the world. Rosita McGee owns the island but has sequestered herself away in her large bedroom since her young son Oliver died on the island. The staff members who live on the island believe Aurelia Escalante is Rosita’s maid, but the truth is much darker. Aurelia is an alias, adopted when she fled the mainland after committing a crime that made her a target of other criminals. Rosita and Aurelia used to be friends but are now co-conspirators.
In “Trouble Island,” Sharon Short delivers a solid stand-alone crime fiction teeming with the historic atmosphere of the Prohibition wrapped in a locked-room mystery. Sharply sculpted characters enhance the brisk plot.
Rosita’s solitude is interrupted when her gangster husband, Eddie, arrives on Trouble Island with an assortment of other criminals, bodyguards, a shady doctor, Rosita’s cousin and an actor who likes hanging out with the underworld. Eddie also halts Aurelia’s plans to escape the island with a handful of jewels and cash to make a new start. An ice storm prevents anyone from leaving, while a murder makes everyone a suspect.
Short layers on the tension as each person’s motives for being on the island become murky. The plot intensifies as Short reveals bits of clues leading to a stunning finale.
Short, who also writes the Kinship series as Jess Montgomery, again shows her strength in historical crime fiction.
Behind the plot: “Trouble Island” was inspired by the real-life Middle Island in Lake Erie. It is Canada’s southernmost point of land and is now a Parks Canada nature preserve not open to visitors, Sharon Short wrote in an email. It was once home to the bootlegging and gambling gangster Joe Roscoe, who built a resort casino on the island during Prohibition. Roscoe would invite prominent people, including politicians, law enforcement and gangsters, “putting his guests in his pocket,” Short added.
Data or dates?
‘The Rivals’ by Jane Pek. Vintage, 416 pages, $18
Claudia Lin, who loves mystery fiction, has found a job that melds her reading preferences with her perceptive skills at summing up people: She’s moved from working for Veracity, which verifies the profiles of people their clients meet on dating platforms, to owning the company. It’s a good fit for Claudia, allowing her to follow the evidence and figure out the motives in real life, as Jane Pek explores in the exciting “The Rivals.”
As she did in her 2022 “The Verifiers,” Pek weaves into “The Rivals” a look at matchmaking, the dynamics of an Asian family and Claudia finding satisfaction in her relationships with other women. Claudia also weaves in company espionage and the infiltration of artificial intelligence.
Now that she’s officially a private investigator, Claudia and her co-owners Becks and Squirrel have expanded their business plans. They now surveil bots that are being used to manipulate clients. Their latest client believes his ex has created a fake profile to humiliate him. When the client dies, Claudia and her team believe that another company is mining their clients’ data.
Although “The Rivals” gets a bit bogged down midway through, Pek has devised an original approach to mysteries with her strong, slightly snarky voice and dry sense of humor. Claudia often thinks about how the detectives in the novels she reads would handle situations. Claudia’s favorite is Inspector Yuan, who exists only in Pek’s novels.