THE END OF HIS JOURNEY

Hanafee offers readers two mysteries to solve in this mystery series entry set on an idyllic Florida island: one from 20 years ago and the other close to the present day.

It’s 2019, and jaded veteran reporter Wes Avery has come to South Florida to leave the rat race up north.His friend Leslie Elliott—the protagonist of Hanafee’s previous novel, Scavenger Tides (2020)—is an aspiring mystery author who tends to either find trouble or stir it up. Twenty years ago, 22-year-old Toby Mason shot himself in the head at a drunken party, but many townspeople don’t think it was the suicide that the shoddy police investigation concluded it was. Toby’s father has been trying to drink himself to death ever since, which gets Wes interested in the case. Meanwhile, two other characters from the previous book show up: One is Frank Johnson, charter fisherman, DEA informant, and Leslie’s boyfriend; the other is Jamie Thompson, drug runner. Johnson and Thompson have a rendezvous on the beach on a dark night and both wind up shot dead. Who may have hastened Toby’s death that night, and who killed Frank and Jamie? Hanafee moves things along in fine fashion, peppering the proceedings with good and unsettling lines: “I’ve discovered that on this island truth and fiction often walk the beach hand-in-hand,” Leslie says at one point. Many leads develop but few pan out; Wes manages to interview several witnesses to Toby’s death, but with mixed results, and Toby’s father is severely beaten. Some parts of the story seem forced, as when Leslie and Frank’s ex-wife, Janis, get drunk, bury the hatchet, and improbably become enthusiastic sleuthing partners. Everything finally works out, of course, although the resolution to Frank and Jamie’s story is a bit more surprising than Toby’s. The denouement may be a bit too sentimental for some readers, but not all.

A briskly readable, if slightly uneven, whodunit to while away a long afternoon.