Ballast Point Breakdown: A Rolly Waters Mystery

A party is going on at the Admiral’s Club with live music in the background when a boat crashes through the glass wall, landing in the middle of the party. A woman stands on the boat shouting about saving the dolphins. Another woman tells her to get down, but the woman on the boat is having none of it. She seems determined to get attention for her cause and does so by shooting herself in the head with a flare gun, setting off a huge fire as people escape through every egress. A few days later, Roland “Rolly” Waters, a part-time musician and a part-time private investigator, is accosted in a bar after playing the last set of the night. Melody Flowers, a pretty young thing, says Janis Waters, the woman who killed herself days earlier, gave Melody some dog-tags and told her to get Rolly to find the man whose name, Butch Fleetwood, is on the tags. Rolly takes on the job even though Molly doesn’t have much money. Janis, it turns out, had been the president of the fan club for a band Rolly had years before, so he does it out of affection for her. He has no idea what a jumbled mess he has stepped into. The police and the FBI are also interested in Janis’s death and the connection to Bruce Fleetwood, a man who supposedly died a long time before, and some undercover dolphin work. It’s a good thing Rolly has a good relationship with Bonnie Hammond, a local cop, and works with her sharing information, or things could get really bad for him. But nothing in this book is as it seems, and the more Rolly gets into the case, the more dangerous things are for him. An old friend, Harmonica Dan, keeps popping up as a person of interest in the case and in Rolly’s life, making things even more muddled. Everything seems anchored to dolphins, and it all comes to a head, a very dangerous head for Rolly, on a small Mexican island. Some people aren’t whom they seemed to be, and Rolly is in the crosshairs.

Author Corey Lynn Fayman has written an engaging mystery with more red herrings than readers can shake a stick at. Rolly is an affable character who bumbles his way through the case and seems to spend more time introducing himself and handing out his business cards than doing very difficult or creative detective work. The writing is good, although it could use a good trimming, the characters are interesting, quirky, and fully-developed, the dialogue is snappy and believable, and there are enough mystery and tension to keep readers turning pages.