The Lost and the Blind

Irish author Burke’s convoluted standalone opens promisingly when Tom Noone, a Dublin journalist and writer of detective stories, is approached by Irish-American millionaire Shay Govern to ghostwrite a biography of Sebastian Devereaux, who wrote thrillers in the 1960s and ’70s and is now a recluse on the island of Delphi, near Donegal. Govern is haunted by a WWII Nazi atrocity that he witnessed on Delphi as a teen. So too is elderly Gerhard Uxkull, a Dane who joined the German navy in 1938 and gives Tom his manuscript describing the same massacre, an event fictionalized in an old Devereaux book. As Tom investigates a growing group of unsavory islanders fixated on the massacre, he unearths a range of hidden motives, one of which is has to do with sunken riches. But it’s all talk and no action until suddenly bodies start dropping. Though Burke (Slaughter’s Hound) has a real knack for dialogue and phrasing, too much happens too fast in the final pages. Agent: Allan Guthrie, Jenny Brown Associates. (May)