The Off-Islander (Andy Roark Series #1)

by Peter Colt

Overview

In Peter Colt’s gritty, gripping new series set along the New England coast, a Boston-born Vietnam veteran and P.I. is hired to find a missing father—but may find far more than he bargained for . . .
 
Boston, 1982. P.I. Andy Roark has spent the past decade trying to fit back into the world. In Vietnam, there was order and purpose. Everything—no matter how brutal—happened for a reason. Now, after brief stints in college and with the police force, it’s enough for him to take on the occasional divorce or insurance fraud case.
 
Roark’s childhood friend, Danny Sullivan, dragged himself out of the Southie gutter to become a respected and powerful lawyer. Now he wants Roark to help one of his clients find her missing father. The case takes Roark to the beaches of Nantucket, where Roark’s finely-honed senses alert him to danger just below the island’s picturesque surface—where the biggest case of Roark’s career may just shatter what little peace of mind he has left . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496723437
Publisher:	Kensington
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Series:	Andy Roark Series , #1
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	267,458
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 4.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Peter Colt is currently a police officer in a small New England city where he has worked since 2007. He spent over twenty years in the Army reserve and was deployed to Kosovo in 2000, where he was attached to the Russian Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and again in 2008. He was fortunate to get to know many Vietnam vets and U.S. Army Special forces soldiers. He lived on Nantucket Island from 1973‑1986. He’s currently working on the next Andy Roark mystery.

Editorial Reviews

08/05/2019

Boston PI Andy Roark, the hero of Colt’s entertaining debut and series launch, came back from Vietnam with serious PTSD and a simple lesson: you just had to kill the people who were trying to kill you. Decades later, he sits in his office, reading Raymond Chandler and doing routine, minimally interesting investigations. Then his friend Danny Sullivan, a mobbed-up lawyer, puts him on the case of tracking down Charles Hammond, the long-skipped father of a wealthy, scheming beauty, Deborah Swift, who wants to make sure that the missing man had no secrets that would hurt her husband’s accelerating political career. By skill and intuition, Andy follows the trail from Cape Cod to Nantucket, where an apparently guileless and harmless old hippy might be Hammond. Or not. But Andy isn’t the only one looking for Hammond. Like Philip Marlowe—or Robert Parker’s Spenser—Andy has a sharp eye for telling detail and male haberdashery. The resulting tale may not be stunningly original, but those who enjoy newish reworkings of classic PI tropes will be satisfied. Agent: Cynthia Manson, Cynthia Manson Literary. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Advance praise for Peter Colt and The Off-Islander
 
“If you like your mysteries to be old-school in the vein of John D. MacDonald, or even farther back to Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, then you will appreciate this striking debut by Peter Colt. Long on atmosphere, detail, and character, it could place detective Andy Roark amongst the classic noir sleuths.”
—Raymond Benson, author of Blues in the Dark
 
 “Where were you in 1982? Peter Colt’s The Off-Islander is much more than a period piece. Colt’s maiden effort introduces P.I. Andy Roark trying to locate a mysterious missing person. The closer this former Vietnam vet gets to finding his mystery man, the more people seem to want him dead. Colt knows the terrain, and the character, and has the personal background to make the most out of them. The Off-Islander is a gripping debut, and readers will certainly want more.”
—Alan Russell, author of Gideon’s Rescue

From the Publisher

Hard-boiled private eye Andy Roark has an accent that displays his South Boston roots, but his years around military personnel have given his voice a hint of the American South. Bringing the two speech patterns together sounds challenging, but narrator Keith Sellon-Wright manages to pull it off. Roark is on assignment, tracking down a father who abandoned his family. There are many suspenseful moments in this story, which is told in the first person. Wright effectively portrays Roark, who is streetwise, coping with PTSD, likable, and capable. This murder mystery, set on Nantucket in the 1980s, is the first in a new series, and Andy Roark is a fine addition to the pantheon of fictional detectives. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

2019-07-01
New England police officer Colt's first novel is a boozy pipe dream of a private eye's search for a long-missing father during a period the narrator guilelessly describes as "a couple of years into [Reagan's] first term."

Geoffrey Swift, scion of the San Francisco Swift Aeronautical juggernaut, has a serious shot at becoming the first Republican senator from the Bay Area in years. So naturally Deborah Swift doesn't want anything to stand in her husband's gilded way. A serious potential obstacle is her father, Charles Edgar Hammond, a Korean War vet who stepped out for a pack of cigarettes while Deborah was still a child and never came back. Since the Army had Hammond's fingerprints on file, it's not likely that he died unidentified, but it's impossible to say what scandals may be lurking beneath his disappearance. Deborah's already hired the Pinkerton agency to investigate his last known whereabouts on Cape Cod, but the locals, true to New England form, have been standoffish toward the agency operatives, who've generated reams of paperwork but precious few leads. So Deborah asks Harvard-educated Boston attorney Danny Sullivan to recommend somebody local and flies Danny's best friend, Andy Roark, from coast to coast for a brief one-on-one and an infusion of cash. Back in Massachusetts, Andy zeroes in on Hyannis, where several veterans' benefits checks were sent to Hammond in 1968, and Nantucket, where his trail seems to lead. Throughout it all, Colt conscientiously supplies the obligatory complications of the hard-boiled formula—sexual come-ons, gunplay, mob figures, betrayals—but in slow motion. It's no wonder that Andy muses to his old friend: "This is a puzzle, almost a mystery." Yep, almost.

Not much incident but lots of attitude.

Kirkus Reviews