KILLER WAVES: A Lewis Cole Mystery

Fourth time out is definitely not the charm for DuBois, as his series about Lewis Cole, a New Hampshire magazine writer with a mysterious past, splutters and creaks ominously. Previous entries, like Shattered Shell (1999), have explored the pleasures of living in a small coastal town as well as the dark ironies of Cole's life: as the only survivor of a disastrous Department of Defense experiment, his reward for silence is a house, a pension and a cover job as a columnist for a Boston magazine called Shoreline. Now that's all endangered by the arrival of a team of spooky federal agents (they say they're from the DEA, but Cole disproves that in a New England minute), looking into the murder of a man in a parking lot near Cole's house. DuBois weakens his interesting central character by listing virtually every single thing Cole eats and drinks—and by beating to death his hero's valid yearnings for the adventurous early days of America's space program. Meanwhile, the plot McGuffin—hidden uranium from the Nazi rocket program, no less—quickly becomes ludicrous, as does Cole's reliance on an all-too-convenient friend, a retired Boston mob enforcer who just happens to live up the road. A somewhat more promising subplot involving an attempt by ruthless new owners to jazz up the local newspaper with some sleazy tactics also receives flat handling. With any luck, DuBois will shrug this one off and return the series to the energy and imagination it showed in its first three outings. Regional author tour. (June 10)

FYI:DuBois is also the author of a thriller, Resurrection Day (1999).