Fans of author Todd Borg’s Owen McKenna Mystery Thrillers will find his latest work up to his high standards, and is common with the series creating a character to highlight how discrimination can be hurtful as well as dangerous.
The new novel is “Tahoe Ghost Boat” and Owen McKenna, the retired SF cop turned private eye living in Stateline has his work cut out for him when he gets a phone call from a woman who fears she is being tailed as she drive to South Lake Tahoe. McKenna helps her out and finds she has a daughter who she doesn’t really care about. McKenna goes and visits the daughter and finds out why the mother didn’t have a lot of love. Turns out daughter Gertie O’Leary is a 15 year old with a mended hair lip, a mess of wild red hair and a serious softball pitch who wants o be a movie director. McKenna steps up to help Gertie.
Of course, McKenna is joined by his faithful and helpful great Dane Spot as well as his longtime girl friend Street, a bug scientist.
McKenna crosses some bad guys and for his pains it attacked, taped up and bound and dropped into Lake Tahoe with an anchor attached. How he survives that is a story all of its own.
Gertie is kidnapped, and the mother who is about to get a $2 million insurance award that the kidnappers want, during which McKenna somehow manages to rig a spinnaker on a sailboat in a mad dash across the lake.
McKenna finally has a battle with the leader of the gang extorting the mother, and he almost loses. And there’s a big surprise in the closing pages as McKenna plumbs for the solution to all this.
As always, Borg supplies a fun read with enough twists and turns to make the reader stay alert. This is the 12th in the McKenna Tahoe series. It will be fun to see how he deals with No. 13.