Rebecca M. Hale's Afoot on St. Croix is even better than the first book in the series, Adrift on St. John. Who can beat the setting? Beautiful islands in the Caribbean... sea, sand, sky, lush tropical foliage. That alone is worth the price of admission, but to the setting Hale adds bits of island history and legend, and a cast of quirky characters who aren't always what they seem.

Afoot on St. Croix is the best sort of puzzle to work because of that cast of characters. Charlie's daughter Jessie loves to terrorize her younger brother with stories about the Goat Foot Woman, but the more you read the more you wonder if those are all just stories. All stories have some foundation in truth... don't they? Charlie's wife Mira, an Italian opera singer and his two dachshunds, the old woman Gedda and her shopping cart; most of these characters start out looking a bit like caricatures, but Hale certainly doesn't let them stay that way. I found it fascinating to discover how all the pieces of this puzzle fit together, and am looking forward to my next trip back to the Caribbean. ( )

Afoot on St. Croix is the second book in the Mystery in the Islands series.

I do enjoy Hale's type of writing, as I enjoy being told a story. She does an excellent job of telling 3 or 4 stories through the book and then brings them all together in a subtle ending.

The story begins with Charlie Baker and his wife, Mira, vacationing with their two children on St. Croix. After vacationing there, Charlie decides that they should make St. Croix their home. But they end up divorcing and Charlie moves to St. John and not knowing that Mira and the children have stayed in St. Croix.

Mira remarries a Muslim who is fairly successful with his grocery store and for awhile is enjoying life on the island.

For ten years Charlie has had no contact with his children and out of the blue receives a phone call asking for him to come for a family reunion. Which never happens, but Charlie's hopes have been risen.

The local cabbies provide humorous times as they like to bet, in between fares, on the chickens that run loose around the cab stand. And the two locals that sell "liberated" coconuts on the street, who can only think of eating pork chops. Last, but not least, tale of the goat-lady, and as the story goes: "children are only an appetizer".

Wonderful cast of characters and a very interesting story.

Looking forward to book #3 ( )

Afoot on St. Croix by Rebecca M. Hale by Rebecca M. Hale is the second of the Mystery in the Islands series. Though marketed as a mystery series, these books really aren't classic mysteries in any of sub-genres. There isn't a crime in the first act and there isn't a criminal caught in the third act. But Hale's other series, Cats and Curios falls into the caper category, so these too are sold as mysteries.

The other interesting thing about the Mystery in the Islands series is that each book is a stand alone. Normally in a series, there's a recurring protagonist sleuth — often someone working in a different field (professional detectives like Sherlock Holmes being a very rare breed).

Charlie Baker is back on St. Croix to see his children one last time. He and his wife (against her will) had moved to the island with their children about ten years ago. She had then divorced him and kept the kids on the island. In all that time he has been writing the letters and not hearing anything in return. But he has the feeling that this will be his lucky break.

As with all her books, Hale switches points of view, giving a chance for the reader to see events from all the major, and sometimes even the minor ones (see my review of How to Moon a Cat for examples). This time it's a mixture of Charlie and his wife's points of view, their children, with the present and past mixed together. Thus the mystery is in the challenge of finding out what happened when and what's going on now.

Although Hale's books are put in the cozy section of the mysteries, in Afoot on St. Croix and in How to Paint a Cat, she has revealed a darker side. There's a thriller writer lurking, waiting to pounce. This book closes on such a shocker that I felt like the final chapters had been ghostwritten by the late Patricia Highsmith or Daphne Du Maurier. ( )