cover image Dog Island

Dog Island

Mike Stewart. Putnam Publishing Group, $23.95 (448pp) ISBN 978-0-399-14645-9

After his well-received first mystery, Sins of the Brother (1999), Stewart scores big again with this second Tom McInnes thriller. McInnes, Mobile, Ala., lawyer and righter of wrongs, takes the case of Carli Monroe on the advice of Susan Fitzsimmons, a woman he met in his previous adventure. Carli, a young teenage runaway, has witnessed a brutal murder in an isolated beach cottage on the Florida Panhandle. The problem is, as McInnes learns the hard way, the local sheriff is in cahoots with the killers. For help with the rough stuff, McInnes turns to his friend Joey, a strapping private detective and former Navy intelligence agent, and Loutie Blue, a former stripper. Their investigation leads them to the Bodines, a vicious extended family known on the Panhandle as the ""Redneck Mafia,"" who are none too particular about eliminating people who get in their way. McInnes narrowly escapes death several times as it soon becomes clear he's on the Bodines' hit list. When Carli disappears and a mysterious Cuban with his own special anti-Castro agenda enters the action, McInnes and his cohorts are really in trouble. This is a good, fast read, but not for the squeamish. (Jan. 11)